Fichte, theorist of the "I"

Fichte:Now the essence of critical philosophy is this, that an absolute self is postulated as wholly unconditioned

Does Fichte give any grounds for accepting that there must be an 'absolute self'? And, if it is self-evident, as he claims, as the foundation of critical philosophy, why is such a claim not recognised by other philosophers?

//ps// actually on reflection before posing this question, I suppose I ought to have perused that PDF, which I'm now doing. Nevertheless, a few words on the matter might be worthwhile.//

//pps// I suppose the other thing that cries out to be said, are the remarkable similarities between Ficthe and Advaita Vedanta, which likewise posits an absolute self, ?tman, identical in type with the 'world-soul', Brahman.//

Those are good questions. For context, I view Fichte as an absolute poet who insists that he's doing absolute science. He is the diamond of "I theory" or I-deology in the rough.

As to accepting the absolute self, I'm guessing that many thinkers do indeed accept some version of this. But I don't take Fichte the metaphysician too seriously.

He insistence that he was doing science tied him directly to the Thing. Science concerns itself with being correct about this Thing that transcends every "I. We might say that it is the revelation of necessity, concerned exactly with what resists the will and limits freedom. Our practical interest in science is arguably to push against this fence, to melt necessity into freedom. But Fichte's assumption that he had to present himself as a scientist is itself an only apparent necessity that melts away in his successor idealists. And he himself (in a different frame of mind) insisted on something like a pre-rational choice of first-principles as revelatory of a man's nature. There's certainly an elitism in Fichte. He feels that lower men are drawn to "dogmatism." I think he even hinted (maybe as a bitter joke) that they actually did not possess the freedom they could not conceive or recognize. In short, I'm looking at him as the father of idealism as philosophy-religion.


I think you're right about the world soul issue. Hegel synthesized Schelling and Fichte, and I think he "fixed" (from his point of view) the absolute self in the sense that absolute self must (as in the TLP) be also absolute world. So we have a self-knowing world that is centered in terms of its self-perception in a particular mortal body. We might understand God to be the essence of this knowledge as it is scattered over billions of different embodied centers of the world's self-knowing. I suppose holism can emphasize that the individual body has no real boundary, connected as it is to the ecosystem and eventually the universe itself. The old problems arise, though, since consciousness is a concept for what we want to call consciousness but might have to call self-differentiating being instead. (Not the part of Hegel I'm especially confident about, but also not the part I really care about.)

Here's the introduction and a few quotes from a different source, which is easy to quote.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Fichte%27s_Science_of_Knowledge

Fichte:

Only when speaking of something, which we consider accidental, i.e. which we suppose might also have been otherwise, though it was not determined by freedom, can we ask for its ground; and by this very asking for its ground does it become accidental to the questioner. To find the ground of anything accidental means, to find something else, from the determinedness of which it can be seen why the accidental, amongst the various conditions it might have assumed, assumed precisely the one it did. The ground lies—by the very thinking of a ground—beyond its grounded...
...
The object of this system [idealism] does not occur actually as something real in consciousness, not as a Thing in itself—for then Idealism would cease to be what it is, and become Dogmatism—but as “I” in itself; not as an object of Experience—for it is not determined, but is exclusively determinable through my freedom, and without this determination it would be nothing, and is really not at all—but as something beyond all Experience.

Here are some quote from The Vocation of Man, in which a different side of Fichte appears. It might be accused of naked irrationalism. His desire for self-realization transforms the talk of science into talk of faith and conscience.

Fichte:
There is within me an impulse to absolute, independent self-activity. Nothing is more insupportable to me, than to be merely by another, for another, and through another; I must be something for myself and by myself alone. This impulse I feel along with the perception of my own existence, it is inseparably united to my consciousness of myself.

I explain this feeling to myself, by reflection; and add to this blind impulse the power of sight, by thought. According to this impulse I must act as an absolutely independent being:—thus I understand and translate the impulse. I must be independent. Who am I? Subject and object in one,—the conscious being and that of which I am conscious, gifted with intuitive knowledge and myself revealed in that intuition, the thinking mind and myself the object of the thought—inseparable, and ever present to each other. As both, must I be what I am, absolutely by myself alone;—by myself originate conceptions,—by myself produce a condition of things lying beyond these conceptions. But how is the latter possible? To nothing I cannot unite any being whatever; from nothing there can never arise something; my objective thought is necessarily mediative only. But any being which is united to another being, does thereby, by means of this other being, become dependent;—it is no longer a primary, original, and genetic, but only a secondary and derived being. I am constrained to unite myself to something;—to another being I cannot unite myself, without losing that independence which is the condition of my own existence.
My conception and origination of a purpose, however, is, by its very nature, absolutely free,—producing something out of nothing. To such a conception I must unite my activity, in order that it may be possible to regard it as free, and as proceeding absolutely from myself alone.

In the following manner, therefore, do I conceive of my independence as I. I ascribe to myself the power of originating a conception simply because I originate it, of originating this conception simply because I originate this one,—by the absolute sovereignty of myself as an intelligence. I further ascribe to myself the power of manifesting this conception beyond itself by means of an action;—ascribe to myself a real, active power, capable of producing something beyond itself,—a power which is entirely different from the mere power of conception. These conceptions, which are called conceptions of design, or purposes, are not, like the conceptions of mere knowledge, copies of something already given, but rather types of something yet to be produced; the real power lies beyond them, and is in itself independent of them;—it only receives from them its immediate determinations, which are apprehended by knowledge. Such an independent power it is that, in consequence of this impulse, I ascribe to myself.

Here then, it appears, is the point to which the consciousness of all reality unites itself;—the real efficiency of my conception, and the real power of action which, in consequence of it, I am compelled to ascribe to myself, is this point. Let it be as it may with the reality of a sensible world beyond me; I possess reality and comprehend it,—it lies within my own being, it is native to myself.
I conceive this, my real power of action, in thought, but I do not create it by thought. The immediate feeling of my impulse to independent activity lies at the foundation of this thought; the thought does no more than portray this feeling, and accept it in its own form,—the form of thought. This procedure may, I think, be vindicated before the tribunal of speculation.
...
I know, and must admit, that each definite act of consciousness may be made the subject of reflection, and a new consciousness of the first consciousness may thus be created; and that thereby the immediate consciousness is raised a step higher, and the first consciousness darkened and made doubtful; and that to this ladder there is no highest step.
...
I have found the organ by which to apprehend this reality, and, with this, probably all other reality. Knowledge is not this organ:—no knowledge can be its own foundation, its own proof; every knowledge pre-supposes another higher knowledge on which it is founded, and to this ascent there is no end. It is Faith, that voluntary acquiescence in the view which is naturally presented to us, because only through this view we can fulfil our vocation;—this it is, which first lends a sanction to knowledge, and raises to certainty and conviction that which without it might be mere delusion. It is not knowledge, but a resolution of the will to admit the validity of knowledge.

Let me hold fast for ever by this doctrine, which is no mere verbal distinction, but a true and deep one, bearing with it the most important consequences for my whole existence and character. All my conviction is but faith; and it proceeds from the character, not from the understanding. Knowing this, I will enter upon no disputation, because I foresee that thereby nothing can be gained; I will not suffer myself to be perplexed by it, for the source of my conviction lies higher than all disputation; I will not suffer myself to entertain the desire of pressing this conviction on others by reasoning, and I will not be surprised if such an undertaking should fail. I have adopted my mode of thinking first of all for myself, not for others, and before myself only will I justify it. He who possesses the honest, upright purpose of which I am conscious, will also attain a similar conviction; but without that, this conviction can in no way be attained. Now that I know this, I also know from what point all culture of myself and others must proceed; from the will, not from the understanding. If the former be only fixedly and honestly directed towards the Good, the latter will of itself apprehend the True. Should the latter only be exercised, whilst the former remains neglected, there can arise nothing whatever but a dexterity in groping after vain and empty refinements, throughout the absolute void inane. Now that I know this, I am able to confute all false knowledge that may rise in opposition to my faith. I know that every pretended truth, produced by mere speculative thought, and not founded upon faith, is assuredly false and surreptitious; for mere knowledge, thus produced, leads only to the conviction that we can know nothing. I know that such false knowledge never can discover anything but what it has previously placed in its premises through faith, from which it probably draws conclusions which are wholly false. Now that I know this, I possess the touchstone of all truth and of all conviction. Conscience alone is the root of all truth: whatever is opposed to conscience, or stands in the way of the fulfilment of her behests, is assuredly false; and it is impossible for me to arrive at a conviction of its truth, even if I should be unable to discover the fallacies by which it is produced.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Vocation_of_Man/Part_3

I don't think it's irrational, but surely it is exceedingly verbose. I seem to recall there being something written by Fichte where he more or less bragged that there was nobody in the world who was smart enough to understand him. It's a pity, I wish I could find something good to say about it, but it seems mainly froth to me.

I found a nice summary of his views in one of his lectures.

Fichte:
I may be permitted to say to you at present without proof, what is doubtless already known to many among you, and what is obscurely, but not the less strongly, felt by others, that all philosophy, all human thought and teaching, all your studies, especially all that I shall address to you, can tend to nothing else than to the answering of these questions, and particularly of the last and highest of them, What is the absolute vocation of Man? and what are the means by which he may most surely fulfil it?

Philosophy is not essentially necessary to the mere feeling of this vocation; but the whole of philosophy, and indeed a fundamental and all-embracing philosophy, is implied in a distinct, clear, and complete insight into it. Yet this absolute vocation of Man is the subject of to-day’s lecture. You will consequently perceive that what I have to say on this subject on the present occasion cannot be traced down from its first principles unless I were now to treat of all philosophy. But I can appeal to your own inward sense of truth, and establish it thereon. You perceive likewise, that as the question which I shall answer in my public lectures,—What is the vocation of the Scholar? or what is the same thing, as will appear in due time, the vocation of the highest, truest man? is the ultimate object of all philosophical inquiries; so this question, What is the absolute vocation of Man?

What the properly Spiritual in man—the pure Ego, considered absolutely in itself,—isolated and apart from all relation to anything out of itself,—would be?—this question is unanswerable, and strictly taken is self-contradictory. It is not indeed true that the pure Ego is a product of the Non-Ego—(so I denominate everything which is conceived of as existing external to the Ego, distinguished from, and opposed to it:)—it is not true, I say, that the pure Ego is a product of the Non-Ego; such a doctrine would indicate a transcendental materialism which is entirely opposed to reason; but it is certainly true, and will be fully proved in its proper place, that the Ego is not, and can never become, conscious of itself except under its empirical determinations; and that these empirical determinations necessarily imply something external to the Ego. Even the body of man, that which he calls his body, is something external to the Ego. Without this relation he would be no longer a man, but something absolutely inconceivable by us, if we can call that something which is to us inconceivable. Thus to consider man absolutely and by himself, does not mean, either here or elsewhere in these lectures, to consider him as a pure Ego, without relation to anything external to the Ego; but only to think of him apart from all relation to reasonable beings like himself.

And, so considered,—What is his vocation?—what belongs to him as Man, that does not belong to those known existences which are not men?—in what respects does he differ from all we do not call man amongst the beings with which we are acquainted?

Since I must set out from something positive, and as I cannot here proceed from the absolute postulate—the axiom “I am,”—I must lay down, hypothetically in the meantime, a principle which exists indestructibly in the feelings of all men, which is the result of all philosophy, which may be clearly proved, as I will prove it in my private lectures; the principle, that as surely as man is a rational being, he is the end of his own existence; i.e. he does not exist to the end that something else may be, but he exists absolutely because he himself is to be—his being is its own ultimate object;—or, what is the same thing, man cannot, without contradiction to himself, demand an object of his existence. He is, because he is. This character of absolute being—of existence for his own sake alone,—is his characteristic or vocation, in so far as he is considered solely as a rational being.

But there belongs to man not only absolute being, being for itself, but also particular determinations of this being: he not only is, but he is something definite; he does not merely say—“I am,” but he adds—“I am this or that.” So far as his absolute existence is concerned, he is a reasonable being; in so far as he is something beyond this, What is he? This question we must answer.

That which he is in this respect, he is, not primarily because he himself exists, but because something other than himself exists. The empirical self-consciousness, that is, the consciousness of a determinate vocation, is not possible except on the supposition of a Non-Ego, as we have already said, and in the proper place will prove. This Non-Ego must approach and influence him through his passive capacity, which we call sense. Thus in so far as man possesses a determinate existence, he is a sensuous being. But still, as we have already said, he is also a reasonable being; and his Reason must not be superseded by Sense, but both must exist in harmony with each other. In this connexion the principle propounded above,—Man is because he is,—is changed into the following,—Whatever Man is, that he should be solely because he is;—i.e. all that he is should proceed from his pure Ego,—from his own simple personality; he should be all that he is, absolutely because he is an Ego, and whatever he cannot be solely upon that ground, he should absolutely not be. This as yet obscure formula we shall proceed to illustrate.

The pure Ego can only be conceived of negatively, as the opposite of the Non-Ego, the character of which is multiplicity, consequently as perfect and absolute unity; it is thus always one and the same, always identical with itself. Hence the above formula may also be expressed thus; Man should always be at one with himself,—he should never contradict his own being. The pure Ego can never stand in opposition to itself, for there is in it no possible diversity, it constantly remains one and the same; but the empirical Ego, determined and determinable by outward things, may contradict itself; and as often as it does so, the contradiction is a sure sign that it is not determined according to the form of the pure Ego, not by itself, but by something external to itself. It should not be so; for man is his own end, he should determine himself, and never allow himself to be determined by anything foreign to himself; he should be what he is, because he wills it, and ought to will it. The determination of the empirical Ego should be such as may endure for ever. I may here, in passing, and for the sake of illustration merely, express the fundamental principle of morality in the following formula: “So act that thou mayest look upon the dictate of thy will as an eternal law to thyself.”

The ultimate vocation of every finite, rational being is thus absolute unity, constant identity, perfect harmony with himself. This absolute identity is the form of the pure Ego, and the one true form of it; or rather, by the possibility to conceive of this identity is the expression of that form recognised. Whatever determination can be conceived of as enduring eternally, is in conformity with the pure form of the Ego. Let not this be understood partially or from one side. Not the Will alone should be always at one with itself, this belongs to morality only; but all the powers of man, which are essentially but one power, and only become distinguished in their application to different objects, should all accord in perfect unity and harmony with each other.
...
To subject all irrational nature to himself, to rule over it unreservedly and according to his own laws, is the ultimate end of man; which ultimate end is perfectly unattainable, and must continue to be so, unless he were to cease to be man, and become God. It is a part of the idea of man that his ultimate end must be unattainable; the way to it endless. Hence it is not the vocation of man to attain this end. But he may and should constantly approach nearer to it; and thus the unceasing approximation to this end is his true vocation as man; i.e. as a rational but finite, as a sensuous but free being.
...
If some among you have kindly believed that I feel the dignity of this my peculiar vocation, that in all my thought and teaching I shall make it my highest aim to contribute to the culture and elevation of humanity in you, and in all with whom you may ever have a common point of contact, that I hold all philosophy and all knowledge which does not tend towards this object, as vain and worthless; if you have so thought of me, I may perhaps venture to say that you have judged rightly of my desire.

Wayfarer, what I have in mind is a post-metaphysical appropriation of Fichte. I don't "believe" in the possibility of metaphysics in some absolute of sense of the word as a science of ultimate reality. I don't think that words have sharp and fixed enough meanings to make this possible. Metaphysics can't quite live up to being the "math of God" that it would like to be, or that's how I see it. So of course I'm not to drag out Fichte's metaphysics as a living option in a post-linguistic-philosophy, post-pragmatism context.
What interests me is the richness of his personality. Like Sartre, he viewed man as a futile passion to be God, though he wasn't negative but rather ecstatic about this. Like Nietzsche, he was a meta-phiosopher who viewed an individual's philosophy as an indicator or "symptom" of his deep or essential self. Schlegel stressed this interpretation of Fichte as a meta-philosopher. Fichte was something of a pragmatist in his insistence on being a man first and a philosopher second. On moral grounds (in the name of his vocation) he rejected an endless hand-wringing skepticism. By stressing the transcendental I and the creative imagination in Kant, he partially unveiled the "creative nothing" that is stripped completely naked and emphasized in Stirner. I would say that his post-metaphysical content subverts his earnestly metaphysical content. He apparently didn't clarify this for himself. I would guess that he was in the grip of a "primordial image" or individuation archetype. The experience of such images comes with an intense feeling of their universal validity. So he wasn't motivated to back off from the metaphysical/scientific claim. He was a prophet of a new post-Kantian Christ image, one which embraced the world and intended to harmonize sensual/material and political reality. I can't follow him in this political hope. I live in a different time.

Moreover, I've followed the evolving idealistic tradition well beyond its father. Fichte can be criticized immanently in terms of his own brilliant I/thing distinction. Metaphysics pursues the thing that transcends every I. It pursues knowledge of the alien, dominant object, which is to say absolute truth. This object is "alien" because it is something to which the rational mind must conform. The I that founds itself on absolute truth (on the results of the Thing-seeking metaphysics or god-science) betrays its own priority or freedom. It makes a claim on others in terms of the revealed Thing. But what it claims is the revelation of the I that transcends the thing, or freedom as opposed to necessity. So we have a dialectically revealed contradiction. So the idealistic tradition begins but does not end with Fichte. (I won't say that it is finished, as long as some of us keep working on its purification/completion. I doubt that it's ever finished for the individual.)

My last point is "of course" it's all froth for the engineer and the politician. Idealism is theology or religious though. Poetry and literature are froth, too. For me it's a given that philosophy isn't science, though I am aware of academic strains of philosophy that really do work side by side with science. But philosophy-forum philosophy is usually the fun kind of literary/religious philosophy that is more an expression and development of "free time" personality than anything genuinely non-frothy. This non-frothy stuff is likely boring to the non-specialist. I remember Carbon's excellent post about the life of an academic philosopher. It was far from the romantic image of the philosopher (to which I stubbornly adhere) as the wise or poetic thinker on the essential human condition. Love him or hate him, Fichte was a non-scientific visionary who, like Hegel, clung to "Science" as a description of what he was up to.

Quoting fQ9

what I have in mind is a post-metaphysical appropriation of Fichte.

But how could such verbosity, the attempt to articulate the inneffable, ever become embodied in an aesthetic? The kind of discursive analysis he produces generates considerably more smoke than light. I am not saying it's 'frothy' because of the subject matter, but because of the impracticability of articulating the kinds of ideas that Ficthe often seems to dwell on, when the 'inneffable absolute' might be conveyed more effectively by a gesture, a sign, even a glance. To much vritti (thought-forms) in the citta (mind stuff)! Rising above that, without dismissing it, is the gateway to the 'post-metaphysical'!

Quoting fQ9

the idealistic tradition begins but does not end with Fichte

Au contraire, I think it began with Plato, and ended with the Germans. At the end of the nineteenth century, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale were all strongholds of various styles of idealism - Hegel, Bradley, Josiah Royce, Borden Parker Bowne, et al - all of whom traced their ideas back to the idealist tradition via Hegel and Kant. Then Moore and Russell and other sceptics and positivists came along and brought the whole edifice crashing down. Moore's Refutation of Idealism was a turning point; the anglosphere, at least, heaved this great sigh of relief and went back to various forms of realism. There have hardly been any philosphical idealists in the universities since (with exceptions such as Timothy Sprigge.)

And considering the verbosity of Fichte and Hegel, that's hardly surprising! You could fill lecture theatres with experts on such philosophy, and no two of them would have quite the same view. And I think that is because at that point, intellectual culture had become completely dissociated from praxis.

Fichte:To subject all irrational nature to himself, to rule over it unreservedly and according to his own laws, is the ultimate end of man; which ultimate end is perfectly unattainable, and must continue to be so, unless he were to cease to be man, and become God. It is a part of the idea of man that his ultimate end must be unattainable; the way to it endless. Hence it is not the vocation of man to attain this end.

Well, a religious metaphysic would see it differently. For example in Eastern Orthodox metaphysics, the aim of the religious vocation is 'theosis', which is a form of union with the divine.

Theosis is the understanding that human beings can have real union with God, and so become like God to such a degree that we participate in the divine nature. Primarily a term found in Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox theology, from the Greek meaning deification or making divine, theosis is a concept derived from the New Testament regarding the goal of our relationship with the Triune God. The terms theosis and deification may therefore be used interchangeably in this context.

This does not imply that we become gods, but rather, that we are to become the fullness of the "divine image" in which we were created (Gen. 1:26), i.e. a perfect reflection of our God, and become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). It may be related to the Protestant concept of sanctification but goes further with what may be expected in this life, emphasizing the element of our mystical union with God in Christ.

Now Fichte might argue that he wants to stay within the bounds of rational philosophy, rather than religion, but then if he is going to dwell on the 'nature of the absolute self', and questions of that kind, it's going to be a porous boundary.

Quoting Wayfarer

But how could such verbosity, the attempt to articulate the inneffable, ever become embodied in an aesthetic? The kind of discursive analysis he produces generates considerably more smoke than light.

Did you read the quotes closely? Fichte the theorist of the act was opposed to Fichte the metaphysician.

Fichte:
And what is, then, this something lying beyond all presentation, towards which I stretch forward with such ardent longing? What is the power with which it draws me towards it? What is the central point in my soul to which it is attached, and with which only it can be effaced?

“Not merely to know, but according to thy knowledge to do, is thy vocation:”—thus is it loudly proclaimed in the innermost depths of my soul, as soon as I recollect myself for a moment, and turn my observation upon myself. “Not for idle contemplation of thyself, not for brooding over devout sensations;—no, for action art thou here; thine action, and thine action alone, determines thy worth.”

This voice leads me from presentation, from mere cognition, to something which lies beyond it, and is entirely opposed to it; to something which is greater and higher than all knowledge, and which contains within itself the end and object of all knowledge.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying "Fichte is right." I'm saying that Fichte was a hot mess, worth contemplating as personality for his own sake and not just as a station on the way to Hegel.

Quoting Wayfarer

Au contraire, I think it began with Plato, and ended with the Germans. At the end of the nineteenth century, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale were all strongholds of various styles of idealism - Hegel, Bradley, Josiah Royce, Borden Parker Bowne, et al - all of whom traced their ideas back to the idealist tradition via Hegel and Kant. Then Moore and Russell and other sceptics and positivists came along and brought the whole edifice crashing down. Moore's Refutation of Idealism was a turning point; the anglosphere, at least, heaved this great sigh of relief and went back to various forms of realism. There have hardly been any philosphical idealists in the universities since (with exceptions such as Timothy Sprigge.)

And considering the verbosity of Fichte and Hegel, that's hardly surprising! You could fill lecture theatres with experts on such philosophy, and no two of them would have quite the same view. And I think that is because at that point, intellectual culture had become completely dissociated from praxis.

Of course we can always go back further into the past. We can contemplate the influences of Plato as well. But German idealism is post-Christian or even a twist on Christianity. I think the Christian view of history is the key difference.

Of course metaphysical idealism is silly. There is of course a shared external world. Feuerbach, at the end of the tradition, tried to sum what remained of it after this materialistic demystification. In his proto-Nietzschean Principles of a Philosophy of the Future, he applies the same kind of analysis to speculative philosophy that he applied to Christianity. Here are a few choice quotes.

Feuerbach:
Philosophy presupposes nothing; this can only mean that it abstracts from all that is immediately or sensuously given, or from all objects distinguished from thought. In short, it abstracts from all wherefrom it is possible to abstract without ceasing to think, and it makes this act of abstraction from all objects its own beginning. However, what else is the absolute being if not the being for which nothing is to be presupposed and to which no object other than itself is either given or necessary? What else is it if not the being that has been subtracted from all objects – from all things distinct and distinguishable from it – and, therefore, becomes an object for man precisely through abstracting from these things? Wherefrom God is free, therefrom you must also free yourself if you want to reach God; and you make yourself really free when you present yourself with the idea of God. In consequence, if you think God without presupposing any other being or object, you yourself think without presupposing any external object; the quality that you attribute to God is a quality of your own thought. However, what is activity in man is being in God or that which is imagined as such. What, hence, is the Fichtean Ego which says, “I simply am because I am,” and what is the pure and presuppositionless thought of Hegel if not the Divine Being of the old theology and metaphysics which has been transformed into the actual, active, and thinking being of man?
...
Empiricism or realism – meaning thereby the so-called sciences of the real, but in particular the natural science – negates theology, albeit not theoretically but only practically, namely, through the actual deed in so far as the realist makes the negation of God, or at least that which is not God, into the essential business of his life and the essential object of his activity. However, he who devotes his mind and heart exclusively to that which is material and sensuous actually denies the trans-sensuous its reality; for only that which constitutes an object of the real and concrete activity is real, at least for man. “What I don't know doesn't affect me.” To say that it is not possible to know anything of the supersensuous is only an excuse. One ceases to know anything about God and divine things only when one does not want to know anything about them. How much did one know about God, about the devils or angels as long as these supersensuous beings were still objects of a real faith? To be interested in something is to have the talent for it. The medieval mystics and scholastics had no talent and aptitude for natural science only because they had no interest in nature. Where the sense for something is not lacking, there also the senses and organs do not lack. If the heart is open to something, the mind will not be closed to it. Thus, the reason why mankind in the modern era lost the organs for the supersensuous world and its secrets is because it also lost the sense for them together with the belief in them; because its essential tendency was anti-Christian and anti-theological; that is, anthropological, cosmic, realistic, and materialistic.

You're probably right that there are no card-carrying metaphysical idealists in academia. But there are of course Hegel scholars. I recently read The Sociality of Reason, a great book. Clearly the tradition is not enjoyed as a live metaphysical option. Even Wittgenstein is old news at this point. Religion is manifested loudly in politics and more quietly in an enjoyment and creation of the arts.

But I'm not sure that it's terribly important whether X or Y is in or out of favor in academia. I doubt you feel sympathy for every name that's currently showered with honor and mystique. These are just institutions. If we stress action and practical value, then (as I said in the beginning) most philosophy is just abstract religion. It's something we do for ourselves in our free time. It's mere "opinion" and maybe even hogwash to the STEM identified hero of objectivity who wants to see the numbers.

Quoting Wayfarer

Well, a religious metaphysic would see it differently. For example in Eastern Orthodox metaphysics, the aim of the religious vocation is 'theosis', which is a form of union with the divine.

Is this not an implicit claim on the true meaning of "religious"? That's fine, but then we're just talking about a theological dispute. As I mentioned I think in my first post, we have (perhaps) two basic notions of this union. We have the divine as the distant thing to be pursued and the divine that confusedly does the pursuing all along, that merely attains self-consciousness in this pursuit. There's nothing bigger than the transcendental I (assuming one accepts this notion in the first place as Fichte did). Any notion of the divine is a notion always already integrated in a system of concepts that grounds and exceeds it. So this system of concepts has to recognize itself as God, roughly speaking. We also have the notion common among the German romantics that the Absolute could be intuited directly. Hegel blasts this view in the famous preface, but I think there's a hell of lot to be said for it.

Wayfarer:
...the 'inneffable absolute' might be conveyed more effectively by a gesture, a sign, even a glance.

I generally agree, though I'm willing to say that from an objective perspective that this experience is only a feeling. But then feeling justifies life in the first place, so there's nothing wrong with that. Nietzsche's portrait of Christ is an unforgettable expression of this radically subject non-conceptual enjoyment of the divine.

Nietzsche:
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” —that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.”
...
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea—“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....
...
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance[11] of all such things.

We live after all of these thinkers, able to enjoy them lined up in a series. We can look backward at Fichte having read Nietzsche, for instance. We can trace the development of seeds, see the resolution of contradictions or see them give birth to schisms.

Quoting Wayfarer

Now Fichte might argue that he wants to stay within the bounds of rational philosophy, rather than religion, but then if he is going to dwell on the 'nature of the absolute self', and questions of that kind, it's going to be a porous boundary.

But I've already quoted Fichte's "irrational" violation of these bounds and stressed the pre-rational choice that he himself mentioned in the choice of first principles. Moreover I've called what he was up to religion-philosophy from the beginning. I get the impression that you think I'm selling Fichte like a used car, as if I'm bound to strange old Fichte. No, he's just a fascinating bundle of contradictions, resolved more or less as his progeny took his basic intuitions and ironed out their obscurities.

I can't do justice to the amount of material here. I can only make a few remarks.

Fichte:This voice leads me from presentation, from mere cognition, to something which lies beyond it, and is entirely opposed to it; to something which is greater and higher than all knowledge, and which contains within itself the end and object of all knowledge.

It is that element of Fichte that I feel most affinity with. There is a lot of commonality between Fichte, Schelling and German idealism, and Vedanta, as I mentioned before. But the point about the latter is that it is still embedded in a spiritual culture and way of life, which I think was generally absent from the European idealists, and remains so in Western culture.

Nietzsche:If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist [Jesus], it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths”

By rejecting God in toto, Nietzsche also... devalues man. Man is thereby estranged from the divine spark within and left as a husk, a mere shell. He is alienated from the wellsprings of his soul. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche proposes that man should not flow out to a God, but should ever accumulate water like a dam; he fails to see that it is the same God who flows into man, nourishing him from within, so that if man builds a dam against God, he will be left in the end with a dry riverbed on both sides of the dam, for the spring will dry up— or rather, be diverted. He thus obviates any possibility of man’s self-realization, and defeats the purpose of his mission. But man as he exists now is an unfinished being, and will always try to transcend himself; atheist or not, this is the condition of man. The quest that Nietzsche set out on has been realized in all true spiritual traditions, of which Islamic Sufism represents the culmination. From his Birth of Tragedy to the very end, this is the tragedy of Nietzsche, and this tragedy has become part of the very fabric of the twentieth century. "The true calling of man," said Aldous Huxley echoing Nietzsche, "is to find the way to himself." The "death of God" has blighted our lives to the extent that it has become the definitive concept in modern thought...

Henry Bayman.

Nietzsche:such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art

Religion as the ossified remnants of a once vital insight, betrayed by ecclesastical power-politics that became religion. There's some truth in it, but it's not the only truth of the matter.

Feuerbach:f the heart is open to something, the mind will not be closed to it. Thus, the reason why mankind in the modern era lost the organs for the supersensuous world and its secrets is because it also lost the sense for them together with the belief in them; because its essential tendency was anti-Christian and anti-theological; that is, anthropological, cosmic, realistic, and materialistic.

I would say 'anthropocentric' rather than anthropological, but other than that, a lot to agree with there.

I am generally distrustful of what is often meant when the name God is used (or invoked). There are many who do really understand that name in terms of 'sky father' (which seems the obvious implication of 'heavenly father'). But I also think that in terms of cultural psychology, this sky-father figure is nearer to Jupiter (a name which really is derived from 'sky-father', i.e. 'dyaus-pitar') than the unknowable One. So I don't think of the sacred in those literalistic terms, but nevertheless, I believe that there is a category of being or experience which is rightly called 'the sacred', and it is that which God is said to depict or portray in theistic religions. That seems close to what Fichte is getting at with his talk of 'ens realismus'. But 'the sacred' doesn't necessarily have to be depicted in terms of a 'sky God'. As Nietszche said, a Hindu will talk of it in terms of sankhya dualism, and the Chinese in terms of Tao, neither of which are theistic. But they're also not a-theistic in the sense that modern culture has become; they too seek or are grounded in the 'sense of the sacred'. So I see a-theism as not only the denial of the sky-father God, but of the whole category of 'the sacred' as a domain of human experience, let alone as the summum bonum or heighest good.

I think clearly the German idealists - Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and even Schopenhauer, who claimed to be an atheist, but believed that asceticism offered salvation - they all retained that sense of the sacred, whereas, after Hegel, and especially after Feuerbach, I think that was generally abandoned or rejected (or inverted, in Marxism, into purely material concerns.)

Quoting Wayfarer

So I see a-theism as not only the denial of the sky-father God, but of the whole category of 'the sacred' as a domain of human experience, let alone as the summum bonum or heighest good.

I think clearly the German idealists - Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and even Schopenhauer, who claimed to be an atheist, but believed that asceticism offered salvation - they all retained that sense of the sacred, whereas, after Hegel, and especially after Feuerbach, I think that was generally abandoned or rejected (or inverted, in Marxism, into purely material concerns.)

I would sharpen "purely material" into political concerns. My tendency to emphasize the subjective pole of spiritual thought is related to a giving up on the social solution. The materialistic kingdom of god (free college and healthcare for all) is desirable of course, but it's insufficiently transcendent. These material things are just a leaping-off point for the higher possibilities of human experience. But concerning one's self too much with the spiritual business of others is already "ethical socialism," or a descent to the usual self-assertion in-the-name-of, or a group egoism that presents itself as anti-egoism.
Here's a Campbell quote we both perhaps relate to:

Campbell:
The opaque weight of the world—both of life on earth and of death, heaven, and hell—is dissolved, and the spirit freed, not from anything, for there was nothing from which to be freed except a myth too solidly believed, but for something, something fresh and new, a spontaneous act.
From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens), that is to say, we are to enter the play sphere of the festival, acquiescing in a game of belief, where fun, joy, and rapture rule in ascending series. The laws of life in time and space—economics, politics, and even morality—will thereupon dissolve. Whereafter, re-created by that return to paradise before the Fall, before the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, belief and disbelief, we are to carry the point of view and spirit of man the player (Homo ludens) back into life; as in the play of children, where, undaunted by the banal actualities of life's meager possibilities, the spontaneous impulse of the spirit to identify itself with something other than itself for the sheer delight of play, transubstantiates the world—in which, actually, after all, things are not quite as real or permanent, terrible, important, or logical as they seem.

...
Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood. Theological interpreters render it ridiculous.
...

IMO, Nietzsche at his best was pointing to this and reported a tendency to experience this. Hence "beyond good and evil" and "light feet."

He quotes Nicholas of Cusa, too.

Nicholas of Cusa:
In all faces is seen the Face of faces, veiled, and in a riddle; howbeit unveiled it is not seen, until above all faces a man enter into a certain secret and mystic silence where there is no knowledge or concept of a face. This mist, cloud, darkness, or ignorance into which he that seeketh Thy face entereth when he goeth beyond all knowledge or concept is the state below which Thy face cannot be found except veiled; but that very darkness revealeth Thy face to be there, beyond all veils.

The "I" is arguably one way to encode an experience of this Face of faces into a "Science." The experience puffs up the experiencer who feels its relevance to the community and insists on selling it "mechanistically" or in terms of the "thing." So a felt objectivity is degraded into a dogma, an object apart from the direct experience that demands reverence, an idol. But work in the political/material world forces us to use creeds, etc., so that only a total (theoretical) transcendence of World really cuts it. The letter is the death or at least the mummification of the spirit. To make spirituality into something one can have knowledge about is (in a way, or so runs my intuition or experience) to lessen or betray it. On the other hand, the highest forms of communication are going to involve exactly these highest experiences. So we "thrust against the limits of language" nevertheless. What the egoist/skeptic gets right is a transcendence of knowledge or the will toward or reverence for objective knowledge. That's the gist I take from Fichte, a transcendence of the alien/unassimilated and therefore dead thing.

A few more quote from this fascinating text: https://circulosemiotico.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/themasksofgodprimitivemythologycampbell.pdf

Campbell:
The fact that valid mythological motifs (for example, death and resurrection) have been used in this way for deception docs not mean that in proper context they are still, necessarily, the "opiate of the people."
Yet they certainly may become just that; for since the ultimate reference of religion is ineffable, many of those who live most sincerely by its mythology are the most deceived—this deception itself being part of the suffering and darkness through which the mind must pass before the Face-that-is-no-face becomes known.
...
An inferior object is presented as the representation, or habitation, of a superior. The love or at­ tachment felt for the inferior is a function actually of one's potential establishment in the superior; yet it must be sacrificed (therein the suffering! ) if the mind is to pass on to its proper end.

This "suffering and darkness through which the mind must pass" is also in Hegel, of course. He's arguably still too rationalistic or bound to the concept, but his work is full of mythological structures (circles,spirals, progressions). That time is necessary for the revelation of God/Truth/I, etc., is a potent idea. It's clear that Hegel experienced some sense of overcoming illusory dualities and was trying to communicate that in a philosophy that was the truest form of religion. (I'm not a "Hegelian." He's just one more fascinating personality to learn from or assimilate in the here and now.)

Campbell:
We have noted that in the world of the infant the solicitude of the parent conduces to a belief that the universe is oriented to the child's own interest and ready to respond to every thought and desire. This flattering circumstance not only reinforces the primary indissociation between inside and out, but even adds to it a further habit of command, linked to an experience of immediate effect. The resultant impression of an omnipotence of thought—the power of thought, desire, a mere nod or shriek, to bring the world to heel—Freud identified as the psychological base of magic, and the researches of Piaget and his school support this view. The child's world is alert and alive, governed by rules of response and command, not by physical laws: a portentous continuum of consciousness, endowed with purpose and intent, either resistant or responsive to the child itself. And as we know, this infantile no- tion (or something much like it) of a world governed rather by moral than by physical laws, kept under control by a super- ordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men's thought in most parts of the world—or even most men's thoughts in all parts of the world—to the very present. We are dealing here with a spontaneous assumption, antecedent to all teaching, which has given rise to, and now supports, certain religious and magical beliefs, and when reinforced in turn by these remains as an absolutely ineradicable conviction, which no amount of rational thought or empirical science can quite erase.

God told mommy, let there be light! And mommy turned the light on. I understand the limitations of "instrumental reason" and the demystification of nature, but (among other things) a certain kind of materialism is just transcendence of this infant's theology of Providence.


CREATION is the spoken word of God; the creative, cosmogonic flat is the tacit word, identical with the thought. To speak is an act of the will; thus, creation is a product of the Will: as in the Word of God man affirms the divinity of the human word, so in creation he affirms the divinity of the Will: not, however, the will of the reason, but the will of the imagination – the absolutely subjective, unlimited will.


In short, nature becomes an "alien" object that we have to submit to in order to dominate. The divine is internalized.

Last pair of quotes, which traces Stirner (a late product of German idealism) to...

Campbell:
And finally, in the Vedic Indian Brhad?ra?yaka Upani?ad we read:
. . . in the beginning this universe was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and saw nothing but him­ self. Thereupon, his first shout was, "It is I!"; whence the con­ cept " I " arose.—And that is why, even today, when ad­ dressed, one answers first, "It is I!" then gives the other name that one bears. . . .
Then he was afraid.—And that is why anyone alone is afraid.—He considered: "Since there is nothing here but my­ self, what is there to fear?" Whereupon the fear departed; for what should have been feared? it is only to a second that fear refers.
However, he still lacked delight.—Therefore, one lacks de­ light when alone.—He desired a second. He was just as large as a man and woman embracing. This Self then divided him­ self in two parts; and with that, there were a master and mis­ tress.—Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. And that is why, indeed, this space is filled by a woman.—He united with her, and from that mankind arose.
She, however, reflected: "How can he unite with me, who am produced from himself? Well then, let me hide!" She be­ came a cow, he a bull and united with her; and from that cat­ tle arose. She became a mare, he a stallion; she an ass, he a donkey and united with her; and from that solid-hoofed ani­mals arose. She became a goat, he a buck; she a sheep, he a ram and united with her; and from that goats and sheep arose.—Thus he poured forth all pairing things, down to the ants.
Then he realized: " I , actually, am creation; for I have poured forth all this." Whence arose the concept "Creation" [s???ih: literally, "what is poured forth, projected, sent forth, emanated, generated, let go, or given away"].—One who thus understands becomes, himself, truly a creator in this crea­tion.

Stirner:
But where is it to get this spiritual world? Where but out of itself? It must reveal itself; and the words that it speaks, the revelations in which it unveils itself, these are its world. As a visionary lives and has his world only in the visionary pictures that he himself creates, as a crazy man generates for himself his own dream-world, without which he could not be crazy, so the spirit must create for itself its spirit world, and is not spirit till it creates it.

Thus its creations make it spirit, and by its creatures we know it, the creator; in them it lives, they are its world. Now, what is the spirit? It is the creator of a spiritual world!
...
As the spirit exists only in its creating of the spiritual, let us take a look about us for its first creation. If only it has accomplished this, there follows thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, as according to the myth only the first human beings needed to be created, the rest of the race propagating of itself. The first creation, on the other hand, must come forth “out of nothing” — i.e. the spirit has toward its realization nothing but itself, or rather it has not yet even itself, but must create itself; hence its first creation is itself, the spirit. Mystical as this sounds, we yet go through it as an every-day experience.
...
As you are at each instant, you are your own creature, and in this very “creature” you do not wish to lose yourself, the creator. You are yourself a higher being than you are, and surpass yourself. But that you are the one who is higher than you, i. e., that you are not only creature, but likewise your creator — just this, as an involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the “higher essence” is to you — an alien [fremd] essence. Every higher essence, e.g. truth, mankind, etc., is an essence over us.

His book as a whole is uneven, but in some sense it completes dialectical revelation of "incarnate freedom" to itself. That it was from the beginning implicit or potential is something that is projected backwards from the end of the process. Only at the supposed end of an objects evolution can we comprehend or enclose its nature. (So knowledge implies the end of a progressive history either in a finale or a return to the beginning. )He has abandoned the alien thing entirely, but only theolgoically of course, for which worldly, serious Marx would mock him. But Marx implicitly "idolized" the world and ignored the transcendence of the world that Stirner borrowed from Skepticism and Christianity. It's easy to mock religion in terms of power, but this is just might makes right with a veneer of politicized religion.

Campbell:From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens)....

Actually, 'sapiens' means, as you know, 'wisdom', so I don't know if 'secular man' should be so described. 'Sapiens' is the Latin countepart to the greek 'Sophia', who was manifest in the ancient world as a kind of goddess or the personification of the spirit of wisdom. I think a better name for todays' 'secular man' is 'homo faber'.

Stirmer:in the beginning this universe was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and saw nothing but him­self....

That myth is also given in the Pali Buddhist texts, but in that context, it is given to rationalise and explain the existence of the Hindu god Brahma. But, of course, Buddhists don't recognise any such god, so the intent is dismissive. (See Principled Atheism in the Buddhist Scholastic Tradition, Richard Hayes.)

The Upanisads have many such creation or cosmological mythologies. Campbell, as a scholar of comparative mythology, was conversant with these and incorporated them in his books on the subject. What I think you see in them from the viewpoint of Jungian analysis, are projections of the universal archetypes underlying cultural forms. But myths are not intellectual devices or 'hypotheses' in the modern sense, they communicate an underlying or archetypical form, which is realised ('real-ised') by the enacting of ritual, which re-enacts the mythological origin or heroic sacrifice of the ancestors or legendary beings. (You see that in a secular form in Australia in the annual ANZAC ceremonies.)

Quoting fQ9

IMO, Nietzsche at his best was pointing to this and reported a tendency to experience this. Hence "beyond good and evil" and "light feet."

Nietszche is quite falsely lionised in my view. Certainly, he could see through the falsehoods of conventional religion, and indeed conventional culture and conventional ways of thinking, but I don't think he succeeded in reaching a higher ground. He has become enormously influential in Western culture but that is one of the things I like least about it.

Nicholas of Cusa, I haven't studied. I feel as if he is one of those writers one would have to study very closely to understand. I am a little familiar with some of the other Christian mystics, however, especially the venerable Meister Eckhardt, whom I believe is one of the tributaries of the German idealist tradition. One has to get some perspective on what all this is about, what purpose it serves, and Eckhardt, I believe, is nearer the source than a lot of the brackish estuaries in the mangrove deltas that flowed from it. ;-)

Quoting Wayfarer

But myths are not intellectual devices or 'hypotheses' in the modern sense, they communicate an underlying or archetypical form...

Of course. They are what some hypotheses are about. Jung's, for instance, which I do indeed find plausible.

Quoting Wayfarer

Nietszche is quite falsely lionised in my view. Certainly, he could see through the falsehoods of conventional religion, and indeed conventional culture and conventional ways of thinking, but I don't think he succeeded in reaching a higher ground. He has become enormously influential in Western culture but that is one of the things I like least about it.

His passages on Christ in the Antichrist are some of his best, in my view. In that sense he's a great negative theologian, despite his intentions. As far as conventional religion, that was toast already in Feuerbach if not implicitly in Hegel who negated the gist of it by trying to make it rational. Nietzsche was instead most original as the scourge of conventional philosophy. I suppose he is influential (with Marx) as a key "anti-philosopher" or "post-philosopher." But for me this anti-philosophy along with linguistic philosophy are just purifying flames. Nietzsche was right. Philosophy is largely the expression of personality. Linguistic philosophy makes a certain kind of metaphysics look futile if not silly. Science has long since claimed the respect that philosophy might have wanted for objectivity. So we are left with an extremely self-aware discussion about values and authority. There's a personal decision to be worked out, too. To what degree do we found our own value on shaping the society around us? Which institutions deserve our respect? How much respect?

Quoting Wayfarer

One has to get some perspective on what all this is about, what purpose it serves, and Eckhardt, I believe, is nearer the source than a lot of the brackish estuaries in the mangrove deltas that flowed from it. ;-)

This strikes me as an appeal to origin as authoritative. X is cooler or more legitimate because it preceded Y. But Chuck Berry is not as good as the The Rolling Stones. We also live in the 21st century, so there's also that gap to consider. For instance, the Athenians held slaves. So there's another principle that balances out this prioritizing of origins. Ultimately (and I find this spirit already in Fichte) we only possess what we have assimilated, made our own. It's like that a certain amount of creative misreading is unavoidable as we go back before the time of electricity and the global village. So I'd suggest that we vote up or down for more direct reasons. "I can't use that."

Quoting Wayfarer

Nietszche is quite falsely lionised in my view. Certainly, he could see through the falsehoods of conventional religion, and indeed conventional culture and conventional ways of thinking, but I don't think he succeeded in reaching a higher ground.

As I see it, Nietzsche certainly achieved an intellectual, and even arguably even an ethical, "higher ground". I wonder what other kinds of "higher ground" there could be.

Quoting John

Nietzsche certainly achieved an intellectual, and even arguably even an ethical, "higher ground".

But Nietszche went irretrievably insane. It has been said in the past that this was due to tertiary syphilis, but many recent intellectual histories dispute that.

Quoting John

I wonder what other kinds of "higher ground" there could be.

The kind that is not insane.

Quoting fQ9

Ultimately ...we only possess what we have assimilated, made our own.

Everyone is the philosopher of their level of adaption.

Quoting Wayfarer

But Nietszche went irretrievably insane. It has been said in the past that this was due to tertiary syphilis, but many recent intellectual histories dispute that.

I don't think the fact that Nietzsche most likely suffered a brain disorder of some kind, whether brought on by tertiary syphilis or, as some recent speculation suggests, frontotemporal dementia, is relevant to the worth of his philosophy.

Quoting Wayfarer

The kind that is not insane.

What kind of answer is that? Not a serious one, I'll warrant. You seem to have strong negative opinions about Nietzsche; but have you actually read his works?

Reply to John I've been exposed to a bit of Nietszche. He has many piercing insights and many pithy aphorisms, but he declared himself an 'anti-philosopher', and he should be taken at his word. The notion that his insanity was a consequence of an organic disorder - well, I suppose it's a moot point, but I am more inclined to the view that it was more likely a consequence of the disorder of thought. But of course nowadays, all such things are medicalised, which is very convenient.

Reply to Wayfarer

I don't recall reading such a qualification of himself anywhere in Nietzsche writings (and I have read most of his works, albeit a long time ago for most of them). In any case even he did say that, I really think you need to read Nietzsche before deciding what he might have meant by it,

Also I don't think it is credible that his philosophy caused him to become insane. And again, the fact that some mental disorders have physical causes is not controversial, and not merely a matter of "medicalization".

Reply to John In my book, 'philosophy' is 'the love of wisdom', or 'love-wisdom', which is realising a state of equanimity, compassion and loving-kindness towards all beings, through reasoned analysis and critical self- awareness. Nietszche [s]had none of it[/s] was lacking in that regard. Sorry if I'm being harsh towards a cultural icon.

Really, what was 'apotheosis' in Nietszche's philosophy? It was 'the Ubermensch' - the superior man. If the Wikipedia article on that subject is wrong, please be so kind as to correct it.

For Rüdiger Safranski, the Übermensch represents a higher biological type reached through artificial selection and at the same time is also an ideal for anyone who is creative and strong enough to master the whole spectrum of human potential, good and "evil", to become an "artist-tyrant". In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche vehemently denied any idealistic, democratic or humanitarian interpretation of the Übermensch: "The word Übermensch [designates] a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to 'modern' men, 'good' men, Christians, and other nihilists ... When I whispered into the ears of some people that they were better off looking for a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal, they did not believe their ears. Safranski argues that the combination of ruthless warrior pride and artistic brilliance that defined the Italian Renaissance embodied the sense of the Übermensch for Nietzsche. According to Safranski, Nietzsche intended the ultra-aristocratic figure of the Übermensch to serve as a Machiavellian bogeyman of the modern Western middle class and its pseudo-Christian egalitarian value system.

Someone please tell me how this is not fascistic. They say his sister sold him out, I think she fulfilled his intentions.

Quoting Wayfarer

Someone please tell me how this is not fascistic

Well, it is anti-populist, anti-Volk, pro-Jewish, pan-European and anti-nationalist. It's still not my cup of tea though:)

Quoting Wayfarer

Sorry if I'm being harsh towards a cultural icon.

If Nietzsche were a "cultural icon" that would be irrelevant to his philosophy, as is your "harshness".

For Rüdiger Safranski,

If you want to critique Nietzsche's philosophy, then back your criticisms up with some quoted passages from his actual works, if you want me to take your views seriously.

Here's a passage that's aged well for me. I relate to his desire to not be sentimental He chose the word that hurt the most. We can mock his excesses, but we'd just be joining in with another part of the text.

Nietsche:
That imperious something which is popularly called "the spirit," wishes to be master internally and externally, and to feel itself master; it has the will of a multiplicity for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling will. Its requirements and capacities here, are the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the "outside world." Its object thereby is the incorporation of new "experiences," the assortment of new things in the old arrangements—in short, growth; or more properly, the FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power—is its object. This same will has at its service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power, its "digestive power," to speak figuratively (and in fact "the spirit" resembles a stomach more than anything else). Here also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is NOT so and so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified—an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them—the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein—it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!—COUNTER TO this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside—for every outside is a cloak—there operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and INSISTS on taking things profoundly, variously, and thoroughly; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe words. He will say: "There is something cruel in the tendency of my spirit": let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not so! In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our "extravagant honesty" were talked about, whispered about, and glorified—we free, VERY free spirits—and some day perhaps SUCH will actually be our—posthumous glory! Meanwhile—for there is plenty of time until then—we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful—there is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text HOMO NATURA must again be recognized. In effect, to translate man back again into nature; to master the many vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and daubed over the eternal original text, HOMO NATURA; to bring it about that man shall henceforth stand before man as he now, hardened by the discipline of science, stands before the OTHER forms of nature, with fearless Oedipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical bird-catchers, who have piped to him far too long: "Thou art more! thou art higher! thou hast a different origin!"—this may be a strange and foolish task, but that it is a TASK, who can deny! Why did we choose it, this foolish task? Or, to put the question differently: "Why knowledge at all?" Every one will ask us about this. And thus pressed, we, who have asked ourselves the question a hundred times, have not found and cannot find any better answer....

One more quote, the kind that some will find offensive.

N:
At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I submit that egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul, I mean the unalterable belief that to a being such as "we," other beings must naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice themselves. The noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without question, and also without consciousness of harshness, constraint, or arbitrariness therein, but rather as something that may have its basis in the primary law of things:—if he sought a designation for it he would say: "It is justice itself." He acknowledges under certain circumstances, which made him hesitate at first, that there are other equally privileged ones; as soon as he has settled this question of rank, he moves among those equals and equally privileged ones with the same assurance, as regards modesty and delicate respect, which he enjoys in intercourse with himself—in accordance with an innate heavenly mechanism which all the stars understand. It is an ADDITIONAL instance of his egoism, this artfulness and self-limitation in intercourse with his equals—every star is a similar egoist; he honours HIMSELF in them, and in the rights which he concedes to them, he has no doubt that the exchange of honours and rights, as the ESSENCE of all intercourse, belongs also to the natural condition of things. The noble soul gives as he takes, prompted by the passionate and sensitive instinct of requital, which is at the root of his nature. The notion of "favour" has, INTER PARES, neither significance nor good repute; there may be a sublime way of letting gifts as it were light upon one from above, and of drinking them thirstily like dew-drops; but for those arts and displays the noble soul has no aptitude. His egoism hinders him here: in general, he looks "aloft" unwillingly—he looks either FORWARD, horizontally and deliberately, or downwards—HE KNOWS THAT HE IS ON A HEIGHT.

My theory is just about everyone who might show up here feels that they are "on a height." What varies is their criterion for recognizing value in others. As I've said from the first post, there are "I" types and "thing" types, which is to say those who stress direct access with all of its attendant egoism and those who insist on a method, a tradition, an authority. In short we have subjectivity versus objectivity in "spiritual" matters. (Science has practical or ...genuine...objectivity covered.) The subjective type has no problem assimilating Nietzsche and laughing at his faults and excesses. Because radical subjectivity has turned all its sacred cows into cheeseburgers. Dissolving fixed identifications and supposedly necessary intermediaries between the self and the absolute is the name of the game.

N:The noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without question, and also without consciousness of harshness,

What utter bollocks.

Quoting fQ9

In short we have subjectivity versus objectivity in "spiritual" matters.

The scare quotes serve a useful purpose here.

What actually happens is that the mind constantly vacillates between 'self and other', where 'self' is identified with 'the ideal', the mind, the internal, and 'other' is identified as 'the object', the external. There has been this kind of back-and-forth for centuries in Western philosophy, I think Kant and Hegel and the true master of the tradition understand that, but most people never attain the perspective to understand what is driving it.

Quoting fQ9

radical subjectivity has turned all its sacred cows into cheeseburgers.

That's good, do you reckon you can PM me one?

Quoting Wayfarer

What utter bollocks.

Of course I already know that we disagree here. Still, the contempt you show for the idea does itself seem like an expression of egoism. We identify with and therefore defend the tradition we are to trim down our egos for. I'm sure you'll disagree, but all I see is direct versus indirect egoism. To be sure, we lose ourselves in the object of study or in the object of our love or in play at times. Of course. But I'm talking the mode we are in when debating spirituality and asserting ourselves as authorities, even if only as an authority on who the real authorities are ("true masters of the tradition," for instance.)

Quoting Wayfarer

The scare quotes serve a useful purpose here.

The purpose they serve for me is to stress a detachment from mere labels. I also don't want to be mistaken for a purveyor of woo, superstition, or sentimentality.

Quoting Wayfarer

What actually happens is that the mind constantly vacillates between 'self and other', where 'self' is identified with 'the ideal', the mind, the internal, and 'other' is identified as 'the object', the external. There has been this kind of back-and-forth for centuries in Western philosophy, I think Kant and Hegel and the true master of the tradition understand that, but most people never attain the perspective to understand what is driving it.

Here's another manifestation of our fundamental difference. You speak of true masters and imply that you yourself are a true master. How else could you be qualified to judge? If you're not a True Master, then all you can do is assent credulously to the judgment of others, unqualified to judge yourself. That's fine. You're a true master. Why not? I'm not sure that there's only one Truth and one Mastery. I currently find that hypothesis unnecessary. My personal journey toward subjectively experienced truth-for-me has involved letting go of various identifications. I don't feel the need anymore to present my scarequotes spirituality in terms of the Authentic Tradition or as some kind of metaphysical super-science. As I read it, this involves letting go of the desire to dominate others ("we are bound by our desire to bind.") I also don't feel the need for ghosts or miracles or anything hidden. I enjoy working with myths, concepts, feelings. We all have access to these things. I don't need the satisfying experiences and positions of others to be false. But you seem to need my position to be false in the name of some quasi-objective spiritual truth. That's fine. But (politely) I don't have to recognize your bare assurance as authoritative. As I see it, it's just a high-brow version of being told that I can attain the level of Clear in a certain religion-science if only I jump through certain hoops. The medium is the message. The first wrong move, as I see it, is assuming this distance or recognizing these hoops as genuine. In my experience this assumption that a medium or instrument is necessary is itself precisely the illusion or just ineffective approach that has to be abandoned. We cling to it because it allows us to play the gatekeeper of the Real Thing. Self-consciousness brings this limiting attachment to light, so that it can be consciously dissolved. That's my experience, anyway. But there's plenty of room in the world for other perspectives, other codifications of other elevated states.

Here's a little creative misreading of Games People Play. The three ego positions are adult, parent, and child. The adult seeks to communicate or transact in a way that is neither condescending or servile. The adult seeks adult-adult conversation or the mutual recognition of freedom and dignity. The parent, on the other hand, seeks a dominant or condescending position. The child wants to charm or win the approval of an authoritative parent. So the parent needs the child and the child the parent.

In my experience we philosopher types just itch to play the authoritative parent role. So we end up with frustration, since we are all trying to condescend to one another, vying perhaps to be the viceroy of the supreme Parent (science, rationality, true religion). This is like wanting to be the eldest child left in charge while the supreme (but also invisible) Parent is absent.

Here's a last idea that's too simple perhaps for anyone who demands a difficult, esoteric style. The modes are

1. I'm OK, you're OK.
2. I'm OK, you're not OK.
3. I'm not OK, you're OK.
4. I'm not OK, you're not OK.

1 is ideal. 3 is rare. 2 is common, at least on forums. 4 is also common on forums. When 2s meet and find themselves appealing to or representing different absent parents, they try to convert their opponent into a 3. But they are really only vulnerable to this attack from the other to the degree that they make a claim on roughly similar parents. The turf is "the sacred." True science, true religion, true philosophy, true moral decency, etc. Finally, the 4 is an anguished 2. This is the suicidal solipsist who invites us to join in a nice game of Why Don't You ? Yes, But...

.Quoting fQ9

the contempt you show for the idea does itself seem like an expression of egoism.

Nietszche was in some ways like a necessary corrective, or a harbinger of the enormous changes that he was on the cusp of. His was an insanely creative mind which could take ideas and view them from many perspectives in ways that had never even been imaginable before. He was surfing the tidal wave of postmodernism as it came crashing down on Western culture.

But the problem is, he was completely deaf and blind to the higher sensibilities. Now I know, just to say that, is immediately to push buttons. "What do you mean, 'higher'? Are you saying that this is something you know?' But I have read quite a bit of Nietszche's analyses of Plato, Christianity, and Buddhism. He is utterly oblivious to the spiritual dimension of all of those philosophies. But he then revels in his own deficiency, and takes his own ignorance as a new and brave and dashing kind of wisdom. I know Nietzsche wasn't a materialist. He was far too clever a thinker for that. But the upshot of a lot of his writing, as badly digested by pop culture, is to more or less underwrite a considerable amount of the scientism that has occupied the ground vacated by religion.

Modern culture is a flatland. That is the meaning of the 'one dimensional man'. There is no 'vertical dimension' against which higher or lower can be judged. You yourself, as soon as I say it, say 'ah, spooks, ghosts, etc', You notice that? You're happy enough to talk about it in terms of culture and symbolism and Joseph Campbell - the kinds of things you can discuss in a tutorial - but it can't have any real meaning, right? There really is nothing 'higher' or 'lower', right? Because there's no vertical dimension.

Becoming aware of the vertical dimension is a clinical description of what happens through metanoia or religious conversion. Of course the mainstream believer will understand no such thing, he or she will simply describe it in the vocabulary and lexicon of the culture in which they're situated. But from a cross-cultural perspective, there are elements that can be identified and mapped against each other. It doesn't mean that all the traditions are the same or say the same things or have the same goals, but they do provide the vertical axis which is entirely absent on contemporary Western culture.

So, do I think there is a genuine higher truth? You bet, but I don't demand that it is only seen in terms of one or another tradition. Of course it's a lot easier for those who do, because they don't have to put up with pluralism and all the apparent contradictions that appear between the various cultural forms, which is an inevitable shortcoming of my style of popular perennialism. But I will gladly own up to my weaknesses, and if you really can show me further faults and shortcomings, then I will try to own them too.

Quoting fQ9

You speak of true masters and imply that you yourself are a true master.

I was contrasting Kant and Hegel, who I believe really were great philosophers in the grand tradition of philosophy - therefore, 'masters' - and Nietszche, who in my view was not.

Be assured I think Scientology is bollocks also and positively evil, If it isn't actually outlawed, at least it should pay corporate taxes.

Quoting fQ9

But you seem to need my position to be false in the name of some quasi-objective spiritual truth. That's fine. But (politely) I don't have to recognize your bare assurance as authoritative.

Not 'your position' - I'm commenting on the various passages that you're providing here. My general schtick is to be critical of atheism and materialism - 'modern scientific materialism' - which is the undercurrent of much modern culture. To the extent you represent it, or the quotations you provide represent it, then I will criticise them accordingly. And to the extent that they are absent the aformentioned 'vertical dimension', then I will criticize them for that, also. You don't have to take my word for there being a 'vertical dimension' - that is something I try and illustrate with reference to numerous sources. That's what I do here.

N:The noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without question,

The condition of nobility is the absence of egoism. It's all downhill after that.

Reply to Wayfarer

It's more a reflection of how any philosophy involves ourselves and concern for our well being. The religious and mystics are deeply "egoistic."

Their concern is how to reach a higher truth, such they are wiser, greater and more fulfilled than anyone else. It's just they pretend not to be involved.

Here "egoism" doesn't refer to a crass notion that ethics is whatever an individual wants, but rather to how it always our status at stake in ethics, value and metaphysics.

The soul who accepts egoism is noble because they do not pretend metaphysics is not about their worth.

Reply to Wayfarer

Interestingly, the "flatting" actually comes out of understanding the infinite on its own terms, of the "higher" value itself.

Since the infinite is beyond the world, it does not depend on what occurs within it. The "higher state" to is not something achieved by a wordly goal or action.

Niether the greed of the consumerist nor the restraint of the ascetic creates meaning. Both confuse actions of the world with Meaning, as if Meaning were defined by making the most money or enduring the most pain.

In either case, they misunderstanding Meaning to be about what the self gets in the world.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

Here "egoism" doesn't refer to a crass notion that ethics is whatever an individual wants, but rather to how it always our status at stake in ethics, value and metaphysics.

The soul who accepts egoism is noble because they do not pretend metaphysics is not about their worth.

Bingo. Exactly.

Quoting Wayfarer

His was an insanely creative mind which could take ideas and view them from many perspectives in ways that had never even been imaginable before.

Well said. He can be an obnoxious thumb in the eye, but he's thought provoking. With Nietzsche we wade in deeper, hopefully to come out on the other side.

Quoting Wayfarer

Modern culture is a flatland. That is the meaning of the 'one dimensional man'. There is no 'vertical dimension' against which higher or lower can be judged.

I personally recognize a vertical dimension. The fundamental idea that I poetize upon and read the tradition in light of is that of the evolution of Freedom's self-consciousness. That's the greatest story I've ever been told. It's the German version of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The "I" or "ego" is a Byronic/Satanic figure. But Hegel (as I read him) interprets Christ as this same incarnate freedom conscious of itself as such. His philosophy(or a variant of his philosophy) would be the (or one possible) conceptual elaboration of the intuitive/pictorial content of Christianity. But note that progress and therefore a vertical dimension is at heart of this vision. Our real difference is perhaps the "post-political" or "Hellenistic" aspect of this idea. I don't think the world can be "fixed." It is nakedly the collision site of billions of "wills-to-power." Sophistry is an old dragon. Mind has seduced mind with rhetoric for thousands of years. I'm even OK with the idea that we just have better and worse forms of rhetoric, but only because my "world transcending" software is in good working order. To be clear I'm talking about theoretical freedom or the ideal that Fichte mentions approximating. I still live in the real world. But the goal is serene autonomy, and that goal structures my moves in the real world.

Quoting Wayfarer

I was contrasting Kant and Hegel, who I believe really were great philosophers in the grand tradition of philosophy - therefore, 'masters' - and Nietszche, who in my view was not.

A matter of taste. The vision of the world as will-to-power is pretty grand metaphysics.

Reply to fQ9 You can go beyond metaphysics, or you can fall short of it. There's a big difference.

Here's a crucial passage:

Hegel:
From this tendency, and especially from the convictions and doctrines of F. von Schlegel, there was further developed in diverse shapes the so-called irony.[51] This had its deeper root, in one of its aspects, in Fichte’s philosophy, in so far as the principles of this philosophy were applied to art. F. von Schlegel, like Schelling, started from Fichte’s standpoint, Schelling to go beyond it altogether, Schlegel to develop it in his own way and to tear himself loose from it. Now so far as concerns the closer connection of Fichte’s propositions with one tendency of irony, we need in this respect emphasize only the following points about this irony, namely that [first] Fichte sets up the ego as the absolute principle of all knowing, reason, and cognition, and at that the ego that remains throughout abstract and formal. Secondly, this ego is therefore in itself just simple, and, on the one hand, every particularity, every characteristic, every content is negated in it, since everything is submerged in this abstract freedom and unity, while, on the other hand, every content which is to have value for the ego is only put and recognized by the ego itself. Whatever is, is only by the instrumentality of the ego, and what exists by my instrumentality I can equally well annihilate again.

Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. Now thirdly, the ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality real in its own eyes and in those of others, in expressing itself, and bringing itself into appearance. For every man, by living, tries to realize himself and does realize himself.

Now in relation to beauty and art, this acquires the meaning of living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically. But on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free)[52] as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.

Does Hegel successfully transcend or obliterate this view?

Quoting Wayfarer

Becoming aware of the vertical dimension is a clinical description of what happens through metanoia or religious conversion. Of course the mainstream believer will understand no such thing, he or she will simply describe it in the vocabulary and lexicon of the culture in which they're situated. But from a cross-cultural perspective, there are elements that can be identified and mapped against each other. It doesn't mean that all the traditions are the same or say the same things or have the same goals, but they do provide the vertical axis which is entirely absent on contemporary Western culture.

So, do I think there is a genuine higher truth? You bet, but I don't demand that it is only seen in terms of one or another tradition. Of course it's a lot easier for those who do, because they don't have to put up with pluralism and all the apparent contradictions that appear between the various cultural forms, which is an inevitable shortcoming of my style of popular perennialism. But I will gladly own up to my weaknesses, and if you really can show me further faults and shortcomings, then I will try to own them too.

I disagree entirely with this. The truly admirable part of religious conversion consists in the recognition and realization of something greater that one is part of; and not of something "higher", which presupposes authority.

The "mainstream believer" will always express their idea of what is greater in terms of their tradition's conception of what is "higher"; i.e. in terms of scriptural authority as it is interpreted by their chosen tradition. The different conceptions of authority in different religions are very different, and cannot be "mapped against one another". For example Christianity accepts Christ as the one truly messianic authority by virtue of being God, and Islam rejects that completely because for it to belief that a mere man could be Allah is the height (or depth) of blasphemy.

So you say that different religions provide "the vertical axis"; but this is untrue, instead they provide vertical axes (which, as I already said, present different, and incommensurable, models of heirarchical authority).

The essence of religion consists in binding (joining) oneself ('religion' from the Latin, 'religare': 'to bind') to something greater than oneself, and does not necessarily involve the vertical notion of authority at all. In fact I would argue that true religion necessarily consists in rejecting all authority whatsoever, precisely because one recognizes the irreconcilable natures of the different conceptions of authority instantiated by the various institutionalized religions.

So, for me the fatal shortcoming of your "style of popular perennialism" is that it glosses over the intrinsic and irreconcilable differences between religions, and tendentiously interprets sacred scriptures in ways that are alien to their meaning and which seek, ironically, to undermine the very idea of their being one true authority, or any "genuine higher truth".

This is not at all to condemn organized religion holus bolus, since it is arguable that it is very necessary for many people who are not capable of, or willing to, think for themselves.

Quoting John

This is not at all to condemn organized religion holus bolus, since it is arguable that it is very necessary for many people who are not capable of, or willing to, think for themselves.

But it does condemn comparative religion holus bolus, doesn't it?

The question that it leads me to ask is: do you think all religions are false, or that only one of them could be considered to be true, and if so, which one, and why?

Quoting John

The essence of religion consists in binding (joining) oneself ('religion' from the Latin, 'religare': 'to bind') to something greater than oneself, and does not necessarily involve the vertical notion of authority at al

How is 'greater' not 'higher'? When one is converted from, say, alchoholism or some other vice, to a moral or spiritual awakening by thus 'binding oneself', is it not fair to say that this amounts to realising a 'higher truth'?


Quoting John

The "mainstream believer" will always express their idea of what is greater in terms of their tradition's conception of what is "higher"; i.e. in terms of scriptural authority as it is interpreted by their chosen tradition.

How is that not what I already said?

Quoting John

The different conceptions of authority in different religions are very different, and cannot be "mapped against one another".

Have you ever happened upon any of those well-known books about world religions, like Huston Smith's book, World Religions? Joseph Campbell's 'Hero with a Thousand Faces'? That is what those books do.

Quoting John

So, for me the fatal shortcoming of your "style of popular perennialism" is that it glosses over the intrinsic and irreconcilable differences between religions, and tendentiously interprets sacred scriptures in ways that are alien to their meaning and which seek, ironically, to undermine the very idea of their being one true authority, or any "genuine higher truth".

That's a pretty hostile and unfriendly thing to say, John.

Quoting fQ9

In my experience we philosopher types just itch to play the authoritative parent role. So we end up with frustration, since we are all trying to condescend to one another, vying perhaps to be the viceroy of the supreme Parent (science, rationality, true religion). This is like wanting to be the eldest child left in charge while the supreme (but also invisible) Parent is absent.

It seems likely that you are generalizing and projecting your own desires here; this doesn't resonate with me at all.

Quoting Wayfarer

But it does condemn comparative religion holus bolus, doesn't it?

The question that it leads me to ask is: do you think all religions are false, or that only one of them could be considered to be true, and if so, which one, and why?

Not at all; I have no problem with the discipline of comparing religions to one another, and I don't know what I said to make you think otherwise.

You are ignoring a third possibility; which is that religions are not true or false at all in any propositional sense of "truth". I do think that some religions may be more practical (in the spiritual sense) insofar as they might be in greater accordance with the actuality of the human spirit. But then, this would most likely vary historically; so that a religion which is practical at one moment in history might be impractical at another.

Quoting Wayfarer

How is 'greater' not 'higher'? When one is converted from, say, alchoholism or some other vice, to a moral or spiritual awakening by thus 'binding oneself', is it not fair to say that this amounts to realising a 'higher truth'?

As I said, I dislike the term "higher" because it carries the baggage of attachment to authority, or 'judgement from on high'. I don't believe in judgement (other than human judgement) at all, but I do acknowledge that many people need to believe in it in order to cope with, or manage, their lives. In other words the idea of higher judgment and authority is for those who cannot, or do not want to, think for themselves, trust their own judgements and be their own authorities.

Quoting Wayfarer

How is that not what I already said?

Perhaps it is what you already said; the point was that I don't think there is any other coherent idea of 'higher'.

Quoting Wayfarer

Have you ever happened upon any of those well-known books about world religions, like Huston Smith's book, World Religions? Joseph Campbell's 'Hero with a Thousand Faces'? That is what those books do.

I read Campbell's book thirty five or so years ago, and probably dipped into some Huston Smith, as well. In any case, the only thing that religions all have in common, in my view, is that one can be spiritually converted (in the sense that one's life can be radically transformed) by coming to care more about something greater than oneself than one cares about oneself. But this "conversion" can be as true of a philosopher, a scientist, a lover, an artist, or even a Marxist, or any other completely secular person not affiliated with any institutionalized religion, as it can be of the faithful adherent of any tradition.

Quoting Wayfarer

And just to think, you're someone I might have actually been friends with! Just shows you can't be too careful with 'people you meet on the Internet'.

I'm just being honest as to what I think, or "blunt" to use your own words. Basically I am saying that I think you are "missing something", just as you first said to me, and which I did not take personally, incidentally. On the contrary, I took it as a signal that you think it is a good idea to be brutally honest about one's opinions, instead of being excessively polite. If I came across as being annoyed when you said that to me it was only because you didn't back it up with an argument as to what I am purportedly missing, and why you think I am missing it. I have tried to provide such an account and argument in regard to what I think you are missing; and I am certainly open to being convinced otherwise by further argument.

So, I am not making a personal attack on you at all, and it is regrettable if you cannot help seeing it that way. If you don't feel you could be "friends with me" because I have my own strongly held ideas that are not compatible with yours, and perhaps irreconcilable with them, then I totally understand; although I don't see that as being inevitably so unless one or both of us is unwilling to change our views on the basis of convincing arguments.
:s

Wayfarer:How is 'greater' not 'higher'? When one is converted from, say, alchoholism or some other vice, to a moral or spiritual awakening by thus 'binding oneself', is it not fair to say that this amounts to realising a 'higher truth’?

In terms of ethics, for sure.

Otherwise, not really. All the truths in question are of them— how they act, how they are ethically better than before, what their life involves absent a vice, etc. In every case, these are a worldly truth, not any sort of metaphysical realm higher than themselves or the world they live in.

With respect to the infinite of Meaning (as opposed to ethics), this person who overcomes their vice has no more worth than anyone else. Indeed, their newfound ethical self is no more Meaningful then their old one beset by vice. It’s in worldly terms, in action, in ethics, in their existence, they are “higher” or “greater.” Their life hasn’t suddenly gained greater importance because they’ve abandoned vice.

In this respect, John is right about the plurality you give to religious truths being a problem. Religions are concerned with the world. They pose themselves as the solution to worldly problems, to death, to injustice, to vice, by their particular belief system and no-one else. The honest Christian cannot say: “It does not matter if you follow Jesus or not,” for it deems itself to be the only solution to these intractable worldly problems which (supposedly) need an answer.

Your pluralism of “higher” truths is disrespectful to any religion which holds itself to be a “higher” truth. To the Christian, for example, you would announce that their belief Jesus was the “higher” truth was a falsehood. You would claim other beliefs could also be a solution to the intractable worldly problems. “Higher” metaphysics always have this problem because they understand themselves as the only solution to worldly problems and meaninglessness.

John:You are ignoring a third possibility; which is that religions are not true or false at all in any propositional sense of "truth". I do think that some religions may be more practical (in the spiritual sense) insofar as they might be in greater accordance with the actuality of the human spirit. But then, this would most likely vary historically; so that a religion which is practical at one moment in history might be impractical at another.

Doesn't this have much the same problem as Wayfarer's pluralism though? If no religion is true, aren't you being just as disrespectful? How can this position accept the dogmatism which is inherent in most religious beliefs?

If religion is only practical, it's more or less rendered nothing more than a cultural whim. No longer is an immoral soul at stake, the particular scared tradition needed or the worth of the world dependent on the practice of that religion. It useful or true only so long as people find it useful or truth. In that case, what differentiates your position from one of secular "flattened" values, where spirituality and religion is eschewed from metaphysics?

Reply to TheWillowOfDarkness

I respect all religions and the right of their adherents to believe according to their scriptures. It is a thorny social problem, though, when doctrines are taken prepositionally instead of metaphorically, because this tendency, at its worst, is what constitutes fundamentalism. By extension, any move towards taking doctrines literally is a move towards fundamentalism. In this uni-spatial dimension, only one religion can be the true one., and it is the tendency of those who do not think much to believe just this about their own chosen religion. It is also the tendency of those whose interests lie in controlling the "masses" to promote fundamentalism.

If there is an afterlife, then some religions might turn out to be more true than others as to their understanding of that; but since such a thing is completely unknowable to us (at least at present) then doctrines concerning immortal souls, resurrection, or reincarnation cannot have any genuine propositional sense for us.

In any case, do you believe it is a good idea to be motivated to live an ethical life by a desire to attain eternal life? The notion I think comes closest to making sense of eternal life is Spinoza's idea of gaining eternity now by seeing things sub specie aeternitatis. Beyond that possibility, I don't think we have any idea what "form" an eternal life could take.

Reply to John Notice that I had amended that last barbed comment I made which was written in haste, before your quote of it appeared.

Quoting John

I don't believe in judgement (other than human judgement) at all,

That's what I mean by the 'one-dimensional' - nothing higher than individual judgement - nihil ultra ego' - as befits out individualist age.

When you go to a martial arts dojo, one thing you learn to do, is bow. It's something I learned from Buddhists, and it's an implicit recognition of something or someone worthy of reverence, venerable - that's what I mean by 'higher'. And I know that it grates - I think it's a valuable exercise to ask why it grates, why it is such a blatantly non-PC thing to say.

Quoting John

the only thing that religions all have in common, in my view, is that one can be spiritually converted (in the sense that one's life can be radically transformed) by coming to care more about something greater than oneself than one cares about oneself. But this "conversion" can be as true of a philosopher, a scientist, a lover, an artist, or even a Marxist, or any other completely secular person not affiliated with any institutionalized religion, as it can be of the faithful adherent of any tradition.

But, how could it? You mean, all 'views' are actually interchangeable - Marxist, scientist, whatever. But you've just sternly taken me to task for saying that religious ideas can be mapped against each other. Now anything will do! One can be very dedicated to anything, it could be said 'he practices his bassoon religiously'. But I am trying here to articulate the common vision of philosophy and philosophical spirituality - that is the idea of 'higher truth'. And I claim you can still discern that in Kant and Hegel, but it is what Nietszche deliberately sets out to destroy. And due to the one-dimensional nature of cultural discourse - it doesn't matter! It's all the same! Truth, falsehood - whatever. Which is exactly the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche both foresaw, and helped engender.

Quoting Wayfarer

Notice that I had amended that last barbed comment I made which was written in haste, before your quote of it appeared.

No problems; I am often enough guilty of "saying things in haste" myself.

Quoting Wayfarer

You mean, all 'views' are actually interchangeable - Marxist, scientist, whatever.

I'm not saying all views are interchangeable, but that all views that support caring for something greater are compatible with spiritual transformation. So, note that I don't believe that any doctrinal, conventional or ideological view is, merely inasmuch as it is a particular view, causative of transformation. I rather think doctrinal views are like symbolic vehicles that some people need in order to achieve the shift that we call spiritual transformation.

Unfortunately I don't have time for more than this right now.
:)

Quoting John

I have no problem with the discipline of comparing religions to one another, and I don't know what I said to make you think otherwise.

It was this:

Quoting John

The different conceptions of authority in different religions are very different, and cannot be "mapped against one another".

fQ9:
In my experience we philosopher types just itch to play the authoritative parent role. So we end up with frustration, since we are all trying to condescend to one another, vying perhaps to be the viceroy of the supreme Parent (science, rationality, true religion). This is like wanting to be the eldest child left in charge while the supreme (but also invisible) Parent is absent.

John:
It seems likely that you are generalizing and projecting your own desires here; this doesn't resonate with me at all.

Hi, John. I was trying to characterize what I see as an obstacle to freedom, which I might call an idolatry of Authority. On my own journey toward an increased sense of freedom and completeness, it was quite a moment when I realized that what Spengler called "ethical socialism" was optional rather than necessary. I realized I didn't have to find some universal truth or method. I didn't have to find and speak the One Truth. Among other things I find the desire to dominate or will-to-power in this notion of the single path/method/truth. That's what I mean by "we are bound by our desire to bind." The "I" is not yet negative or pure enough if it still leans on something external or objective. Letting go of this kind of dominance is still arguably will-to-power, but I consider it a sublimation.

Reply to John

An afterlife is worldly though, not metaphysical. For a religions claims to be true, for them to be right in some way, depends on the existence of a particular afterlife, on a relationship between existing states (our lives on Earth in the first instance, an existing afterlife in the second). It's entirely propositional. Rather than unknowable to us, it is just unknown (or rather unconfirmed), as we haven't yet got to observe the context of an afterlife.

No doubt it is fine to be motivated to live an ethical life, whether because of a belief in eternal life or not, but what does that have to do with metaphysics or religious claims about the world? It's a description of a utility to religious belief (some people are motivated to act ethically be the promise of eternal life), not of religious beliefs themselves and what they understand is so important.

You are saying to the religious person: "It's great you are motivated to be ethical by the promise of eternal life, but you don't really know what you're talking about, so we don't have to believe what your saying or act in the way you demand." It's disrespect for what makes their belief and what it is so important.

John: In any case, do you believe it is a good idea to be motivated to live an ethical life by a desire to attain eternal life? The notion I think comes closest to making sense of eternal life is Spinoza's idea of gaining eternity now by seeing things sub specie aeternitatis. Beyond that possibility, I don't think we have any idea what "form" an eternal life could take.

I think that's an error. It's a problem drawn from imagining eternal life is infinite. Considered as an infinite, it's impossible to define an afterlife because it would have to be without beginning or end. It's an outright contradiction: if an afterlife were infinite, it would have to always be around. We couldn't live on Earth and then have an (infinite) afterlife begin.

Since we are finite states, it's also impossible to define what constitutes an infinite life. It doesn't allow for the definition of any state or moment to constitute an afterlife. In an infinite afterlife, no-one could be or do anything-- it's absent everything that constitutes life.

But the infinite account is a misreading of just about every notion of the afterlife. Though afterlives are often "eternal (i.e. without end)," they are transfinite, rather than infinite. Instead of being without beginning or end, afterlives are actually finite, only endlessly emerging or repeating. After death, the individual retains their identity, their personality, their relationships, (sometimes) their property (buried with them) or some combination thereof. This is how people imagine it-- a solution to the worldly problem of death: a world (i.e. finite) in which there is no death.

Desperately holding on to an afterlife is sort of the opposite of seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis. It's an attempt to hold onto the world, to carry on the relevance of one particular subjectivity forever, rather than understand Substance or infinite which is always expressed.

To see the world sub specie aeternitatis is to understand it doesn't depend on you or anything you encounter. No matter what is happening in the world, Substance is so. Every state is expressing it, any state will express it. All states (logically) dependent only on themselves. Nihilism is dead (Meaning is necessary). God is dead (non-existent, Real, infinite). Idealism is dead (things are themselves, not logically defined by another finite state). Ethics are given in themselves (things themselves express moral value).

For someone who sees sub specie aeternitatis, an afterlife life is just another place in the Universe. Yet more instances of existence, subject to various worldly, political and ethical concerns (e.g. who gets in, are any religions right, etc.). An afterlife really has nothing to do with Substance, the infinite, Meaning or logic (i.e. metaphysics).

Quoting John

n other words the idea of higher judgment and authority is for those who cannot, or do not want to, think for themselves, trust their own judgements and be their own authorities.

This is roughly how I see things. Of course we assimilate messages from various authorities in order to construct our selves in the first place, so I see it as a transition from leaning on influences to finally embracing one's own authority. Ideally we fuse and update our influences to adapt to an always changing reality. We have to make it new, keep it fresh, add features, debug.

Some may find this interesting.

Hegel:
But in Thought, Self moves within the limits of its own sphere; that with which it is occupied – its objects are as absolutely present to it [as they were distinct and separate in the intellectual grade above mentioned] ; for in thinking I must elevate the object to Universality.[40] This is utter and absolute Freedom, for the pure Ego, like pure Light, is with itself alone [is not involved with any alien principle] ; thus that which is diverse from itself, sensuous or spiritual, no longer presents an object of dread, for in contemplating such diversity it is inwardly free and can freely confront it. A practical interest makes use of, consumes the objects offered to it: a theoretical interest calmly contemplates them, assured that in themselves they present no alien element. – Consequently, the ne plus ultra of Inwardness, of Subjectiveness, is Thought. Man is not free, when he is not thinking; for except when thus engaged he sustains a relation to the world around him as to another, an alien form of being. This comprehension – the penetration of the Ego into and beyond other forms of being with the most profound self-certainty [the identity of subjective and objective Reason being recognized], directly involves the harmonization of Being: for it must be observed that the unity of Thought with its Object is already implicitly present [i.e., in the fundamental constitution of the Universe], for Reason is the substantial basis of Consciousness as well as of the External and Natural. Thus that which presents itself as the Object of Thought is no longer an absolutely distinct form of existence [ein Jenseits], not of an alien and grossly substantial [as opposed to intelligible] nature.

Hegel:
What the Will is in itself can be known only when these specific and contradictory forms of volition have been eliminated. Then Will appears as Will, in its abstract essence. The Will is Free only when it does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself (for as long as it does so, it is dependent), but wills itself alone – wills the Will. This is absolute Will – the volition to be free. Will making itself its own object is the basis of all Right and Obligation – consequently of all statutory determinations of Right, categorical imperatives, and enjoined obligations. The Freedom of the Will per se, is the principle and substantial basis of all Right – is itself absolute, inherently eternal Right, and the Supreme Right in comparison with other specific Rights; nay, it is even that by which Man becomes Man, and is therefore the fundamental principle of Spirit.

Hegel:
So Spirit is only that which it attains by its own efforts; it makes itself actually what it always was potentially.... What Spirit really strives for is the realization of its Ideal being; but in doing so, it hides that goal from its own vision, and is proud and well satisfied in this alienation from it.

Reply to fQ9 One thing I find problematical in many of these quotes is the usage of the word 'ego'. I think my understanding is more in line with Freud's who of course came along much later than Hegel or Fichte. But that is the view that ego is one's sense of personal identity or 'one's idea of oneself' - more like the 'persona' or person than the self as a fundamental principle. What's confusing is that Fichte and Hegel both use the term 'ego' in a way that is much nearer the Hindu 'atman'. That word also simply means the self (I think the first-person pronoun form). But in the philosophy of the vedanta, 'the self' is not 'the person' or 'the ego', indeed it is the ego with its attachments to the objects of sense which obscures the 'real self', so 'realising the self' is another description for realising moksha, or liberation.

I think that understanding is actually quite similar to the above, but the problem is words such as 'thought', 'ego', 'self', 'other', and 'absolute' are highly ramified, i.e. they have a particular meaning in light of the whole of Hegel's thought. But I think overall, you would agree, that such expressions are broadly speaking religious in outlook.

I still like the software metaphor. Our personalities evolve and (if we're lucky) we attain a state of equilibrium or general satisfaction. We have arrived somewhere. We are on top of some kind of mountain. Maybe it's not the only mountain. Maybe we no longer need it to be the only mountain. We project the height attained backwards as a potential within our younger selves. This is what we were aiming for all along. This is who was trying to get out. So perhaps we write lifephilosophy especially for some analog of that younger self. By assumption he's scaling our mountain. In retrospect we see shortcuts that we could have taken. Self-love conquers time as we pass these shortcuts on. He'll get there/here sooner than we did (or so we hope) and figure out more shortcuts for the next guy.

Quoting fQ9

Our personalities evolve and (if we're lucky) we attain a state of equilibrium or general satisfaction.

I think that is rather more modest than what Hegel was shooting for. ;-)

Quoting Wayfarer

ne thing I find problematical in many of these quotes is the usage of the word 'ego'. I think my understanding is more in line with Freud's who of course came along much later than Hegel or Fichte. But that is the view that ego is one's sense of personal identity or 'one's idea of oneself' - more like the 'persona' or person than the self as a fundamental principle.

As I understand it, all the petty or "finite" aspects of the self have to be burned away to reveal the I in its purity. The self has to raise itself up to God by abandoning finite content. It has to sift itself. A few more quotes.

Hegel:
There is something in its object concealed from consciousness if the object is for consciousness an “other”, or something alien, and if consciousness does not know the object as its self. This concealment, this secrecy, ceases when the Absolute Being qua spirit is object of consciousness. For here in its relation to consciousness the object is in the form of self; i.e. consciousness immediately knows itself there, or is manifest, revealed, to itself in the object. Itself is manifest to itself only in its own certainty of self; the object it has is the self; self, however, is nothing alien and extraneous, but inseparable unity with itself, the immediately universal. It is the pure notion, pure thought, or self-existence, (being-for-self), which is immediately being, and, therewith, being-for-another, and, qua this being-for-another, is immediately turned back into itself and is at home with itself (bei sich). It is thus the truly and solely revealed. The Good, the Righteous, the Holy, Creator of Heaven and Earth, etc. — all these are predicates of a subject, universal moments, which have their support on this central point, and only are when consciousness goes back into thought.
As long as it is they that are known, their ground and essential being, the Subject itself, is not yet revealed; and in the same way the specific determinations of the universal are not this universal itself. The Subject itself, and consequently this pure universal too, is, however, revealed as self; for this self is just this inner being reflected into itself, the inner being which is immediately given and is the proper certainty of that self, for which it is given. To be in its notion that which reveals and is revealed — this is, then, the true shape of spirit; and moreover, this shape, its notion, is alone its very essence and its substance. Spirit is known as self-consciousness, and to this self-consciousness it is directly revealed, for it is this self-consciousness itself. The divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity which is intuitively apprehended (angeschaut)

...
Therefore to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier [on pp. 435-6, 505-6], does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.

This implies that the spirit, in order to win its totality and freedom, detaches itself from itself and opposes itself, as the finitude of nature and spirit, to itself as the inherently infinite. With this self-diremption there is bound up, conversely, the necessity of rising out of this state of scission (within which the finite and the natural, the immediacy of existence, the natural heart, are determined as the negative, the evil, and the bad) and of entering the realm of truth and satisfaction only through the overcoming of this negative sphere. Therefore the spiritual reconciliation is only to be apprehended and represented as an activity, a movement of the spirit, as a process in the course of which a struggle and a battle arises, and grief, death, the mournful sense of nullity, the torment of spirit and body enter as an essential feature. For just as God at first cuts himself off from finite reality, so finite man, who begins of himself outside the Kingdom of God, acquires the task of elevating himself to God, detaching himself from the finite, abolishing its nullity, and through this killing of his immediate reality becoming what God in his appearance as man has made objective as true reality.

Quoting Wayfarer

I think that is rather more modest than what Hegel was shooting for. ;-)

You forget perhaps that I'm creatively misreading Hegel with my eyes wide open. I can't drag all of his glorious system into the 21st century. What I can do is assimilate some of his best passages and read them in a new light. I don't view him as an authority. I do love the old dragon, of course. But I'm going to take what I need and build my own system. My creativity these days is largely channelled into synthesizing and purifying this theory of the I or the theory of incarnate or mortal Freedom. The material is already out there. Of course German idealism is thick with it, but we can find it already in "All is vanity" and "Before Abraham was, I am." Or just religion in general, of course. I read these texts from a "realization" that is already past tense for me. I've been here (wherever this is) for almost 10 years, developing and perfecting my own brand of theology, which is hardly my own at all. Of course I know it's not for everyone. But that's OK. That's part of the freedom.

Quoting Wayfarer

But I think overall, you would agree, that such expressions are broadly speaking religious in outlook.

I've decided to embrace the term theology for what I'm interested in. Yes, it is religion. I am some kind of unorthodox Christian. One of the reasons I like the Germans is because they continue Christianity, the religion of my childhood. It's nice to connect one's end to one's beginning, to draw circles. I plan to live awhile, of course, but there is and has been a real sense of consummation.

Continuing the thought above:
In "all is vanity" we have what I view as the death of finite personality. Nihilism is like a dark night of the soul. It burns out any kind of God that is not pure spirit. As I understand it, spirit is nothing really other than its own self-consciousness. To say that God is spirit is to say that God is subjective or rather subjectivity itself in its highest state. Hegel insisted that History was the work of God, but I can't follow him there.

The I that am before Abraham was is or can be read as the absolute I. That is perhaps the most strange and beautiful passage in the New Testament. Direct unmediated access that precedes all tradition, though in truth this precedence is projected backwards from tradition's achieved consummation. In retrospect this direct access or spiritual potential was there all along. But the spirit in its finite attachments could only experience this as a threat to its nature, which was entangled in --identified with-- constraints on freedom. God is a devouring fire, the terror of finite personality. What survives the furnace is the perfectly free (because content-less and dis-identified) "I." Of course the empirical self lives on in its idiosyncrasies, so I'm thinking of the evolution of the ego ideal = the sacred.
But I'm aware as I write all of this that's it's just not going to work for or appeal to everyone. I still enjoy giving it the best shape that I can manage on the fly.

Quoting fQ9

That is perhaps the most strange and beautiful passage in the New Testament.

Actually it's from Genesis, when the Lord is asked His identity, he answers 'I am that I am'.

Quoting fQ9

Nihilism is like a dark night of the soul.

Nietzsche, as you're no doubt aware, predicted that nihilism would become widespread in the West, as a natural consequence of the 'death of God'. He understood, I think in a way that many more recent atheists do not, the sense in which this event removed the foundations for any kind of ethical normatives in Western culture. That was what, as I understand it, the 'uberman' and the will-to-power was supposed to remedy, although, as I have said, I am dubious in the extreme as to whether that was ever going to work.

Spiritual traditions and philosophies are, in my view, the record of those who have explored these questions. That doesn't make them right but on the other hand, they do provide many valuable perspectives, and I think they show up a lot of the things we generally take for granted about such ideas.

Quoting Wayfarer

Actually it's from Genesis, when the Lord is asked His identity, he answers 'I am that I am'.

Well, yeah, that's what JC is or was or rather am alluding to blasphemously.

On the other issue:

The world is going to Hell. The world is perfect. This is just my prejudice, but for me the spiritual differs from the political in its transcendence or abandonment of the world. We have to live and act in it, but the spiritual in us (as I understand it) sees through the drama, sees it as nothing, as ripples in the nothingness, or as relatively inessential. So there's something cold and terrible in the spiritual as I understand it. Not cruel or sadistic but detached, statue-like. For me it's a given that the world is noise and confusion that will eventually reclaim me. The true glory of human life is transcending the harried and fearful state of a hunted animal or a guilty child and standing serene and self-possessed in the chaos --seeing it as a nullity. The image of God in a man's soul is (as I see it) the pattern of this autonomy and self-posession. But for me (who hasn't uttered a prayer for decades) this is image as image, or the ideal I.

So "all is vanity" can be read as the voice of God within man as his awakened essence. But there is a world-weariness in that phrase, too. The thrill may indeed come and go for Solomon who was wise and astonished at nothing long since. But the gist is that I refuse to worry about the future of man or even about his present, at least when it comes to theology. Maybe I vote,etc., but that's not the highest. That's not the fruit. That's digging in the garden. Theology (for me) is precisely what finds the silence in the noise and the stillness in the movement.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

You are saying to the religious person: "It's great you are motivated to be ethical by the promise of eternal life, but you don't really know what you're talking about, so we don't have to believe what your saying or act in the way you demand." It's disrespect for what makes their belief and what it is so important.

No, I'm not saying that at all. I acknowledge that people may accept evidence for an afterlife that I would not. What evidence anyone accepts is up to them; or maybe it isn't, maybe people simply believe what they are disposed to, or are able to, believe. Personally I am constitutionally incapable of believing anything which is not either intuitively self-evident, or able to be rationally, mathematically or empirically demonstrated.

But I would never criticize anyone's deeply held beliefs except in a situation such as a forum like this where people willingly expose their ideas and beliefs to critique.You seem to have changed your tune; it always used to be you going on in a seemingly disparaging tone about people believing what you claim are falsehoods.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

I think that's an error. It's a problem drawn from imagining eternal life is infinite.

What exactly do you mean by "infinite" here? I am not proposing that eternal life could be of infinite duration, because it logically cannot be of any duration at all, since the eternal is atemporal; and only temporal phenomena have duration. This is really just a matter of logical definition.

Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness

All states (logically) dependent only on themselves. Nihilism is dead (Meaning is necessary). God is dead (non-existent, Real, infinite). Idealism is dead (things are themselves, not logically defined by another finite state). Ethics are given in themselves (things themselves express moral value).

I have no idea what you are getting at with these seemingly contradictory and/ or incoherent, even perverse, statements; you need to explain yourself a bit more if you want to receive any response.

Reply to Wayfarer

OK, maybe you have a different definition of the term "mapped against". For me, for there to be a genuinely credible belief in divinely given authority there must be belief in a posited divine lawgiver. I don't think this idea really exists in Buddhism, or even in Hinduism (specifically Brahmanism).

However the idea of "perfect enlightenment" does exist in those religions which means that fallible humans are revered as spiritual authorities. I think this is a failing in those religions, and is subject to much abuse. But then, in a different way, so is the idea of divine authority as embodied in the leader of the Church, the Imam, or the Rabbi.

In any case I think the idea of divine authority, which is understood to be deliberately given by God via His Grace or revelation, is very different to the notion of spiritual authority gained by self-realized enlightenment, and guaranteed by transmission and succession. So, no, I don't think the two conceptions can be mapped onto one another at all; but they may certainly be compared, as I have just done in a very cursory way.

Reply to John I think your issue is with religious authority, or authority figures. As you say, Western religion is very different in Buddhism which empowers the lineage of teachers who pass on the torch through a kind of distributed network. The European/Catholic model is based on a central authority and the power flows from and to the centre. But I think it's a mistake to characterise the whole idea of there being a higher truth in those terms. And I get that such expressions are very non-PC - it's interesting why they're like that. I think a lot of it stems from the fear of religion.

Thomas Nagel:IN SPEAKING OF THE FEAR OF RELIGION, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.

Quoting John

I would never criticize anyone's deeply held beliefs

Had the exact same dialogue with AndrewK a few weeks back. We respect people's beliefs, because we respect the right of people to believe them. Not because of their content, however.

Quoting fQ9

We have to live and act in it, but the spiritual in us (as I understand it) sees through the drama, sees it as nothing, as ripples in the nothingness, or as relatively inessential.

I don't think so. The Christian message is, after all, 'god so loved the world...' It is true that some forms of 'spirituality' can become sheer indifference, but I don't think that the authentic or worthwhile forms are like that.

In any case, as you know, Hegel had this magnificent scheme wherein the various nations and cultures were the expression of geist (from whence that marvellous word, 'zeitgeist').

Thomas Nagel:It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

I would not want there to be a judgmental God, to be sure. Nor would I want there to be an overarching cosmic agenda.

But such Gods are exclusively the Gods of "established religions and religious institutions", whose "objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence" are all results of what is held by those institutions to be the Will of God, so Nagel's distinction here seems to be incoherent; effectively a non-distinction.

Quoting Wayfarer

I don't think so. The Christian message is, after all, 'god so loved the world...' It is true that some forms of 'spirituality' can become sheer indifference, but I don't think that the authentic or worthwhile forms are like that.

In any case, as you know, Hegel had this magnificent scheme wherein the various nations and cultures were the expression of geist (from whence that marvellous word, 'zeitgeist').

That is certainly one and perhaps the dominant version of the Christian message. But I don't find it plausible or desirable.

Here is an example of Hegel losing the I in the We and the individual in the state. He was of course an employee of the state. It's easy to imagine his optimism. But this is why Popper attacked him. His deification of the state sets the stage for disaster. But I don't reject this on political terms. That would defeat my purpose. I reject the deification of the state as bad religion. This is of course only a value judgment on my part.

Hegel:

It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses – all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. For his spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence – Reason – is objectively present to him, that it possesses objective immediate existence for him.

Thus only is he fully conscious; thus only is he a partaker of morality – of a just and moral social and political life. For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.

Quoting fQ9

But this is why Popper attacked him. His deification of the state sets the stage for disaster. But I don't reject this on political terms. That would defeat my purpose. I reject the deification of the state as bad religion. This is of course only a value judgment on my part.

I think Popper got it wrong when he thought Hegel would valorize a "closed society". I think Hegel saw politics (manifested as the state) as the expression of the human spirit, the "zeitgeist" which he saw as the equivalent of the absolute spirit. Hegel certainly wanted to free humanity; via speculative reason, from the "aegis of tutelage". So, in short, I don't believe he deified the state at all in the way you seem to be suggesting. To think that would be to read him superficially.

Quoting Wayfarer

That's what I mean by the 'one-dimensional' - nothing higher than individual judgement - nihil ultra ego' - as befits out individualist age.

When you go to a martial arts dojo, one thing you learn to do, is bow. It's something I learned from Buddhists, and it's an implicit recognition of something or someone worthy of reverence, venerable - that's what I mean by 'higher'. And I know that it grates - I think it's a valuable exercise to ask why it grates, why it is such a blatantly non-PC thing to say.

When I speak of "human judgement" being the only judgement, I am not advocating egoism or individualism. Human judgement is greater than mere individual judgement because if the latter has not assimilated the former then it is ignorant, untutored and irrelevant.

You should know that I do consider many things to be worthy of reverence. Nature is worthy of reverence, and so are the living beings, including humans, that are part of nature. The arts are worthy of reverence. Science is worthy of reverence. Love and good will are worthy of reverence. Discipline and learning are worthy of reverence. Creativity and ingenuity are worthy of reverence, What is not worthy of reverence is what is petty, insecure, small-minded, fearful, selfish, grasping, envious, self-piteous, resentful, and so on.

Regarding your martial arts reference: I attend Tai Chi classes, and I bow to the teacher with reverence in my heart; I revere his mastery.

Reply to John
I don't side with Popper against Hegel. But I'm stressing that Hegel may not have the same relevance or plausibility with respect to the entirety of his system after Hitler, etc. But most importantly I reject (as a personal choice) what I'd call the descent of theology into politics. Politics is just the endless collision of preferences in terms of principles. We cannot escape politics as a fact. We will exert ourselves in the world for money, status, recognition, etc. But a theology that descends into politics is small. The individual becomes a mouthpiece for his momentary vision of the Right. He almost necessarily loses himself in a group that shares his preferences, prejudices, visions of the Right. He loses his grand solitude and a recurrent "transcendence of the world."

I've sketched out my likely unlikeable ideas about politics and religion.

The infinite is the negation of the finit. It is nothing positive or hidden, nothing more than the finite gathered into a unity and annihilated as the source of or the authority upon the self's value and dignity. Oversimplifying to get the point across, the self is structured by or is the "incarnation" of a Cause. This cause is its avatar on the world stage, its public self, or what it separates from its one thousand idiosyncrasies as its righteous essence. This cause is the self's worth or substantial being in its own eyes. Religion is still just politics to the degree that this cause is a finite or particular protagonist on the world stage, opposed to other finite and particular causes. It is implicitly or explicitly the imposition of duty toward and reverence for the particularity of its avatar, which is to say its own idiosyncratic specifications of the good and the authoritative. It crudely expresses itself as violence and more gently expresses itself as persuasive speech, which can arguably be described as rhetoric since the authority of a particular notion of the rational is itself a matter of debate. A non-political or infinite religion (which happily negates its attachment to these very terms) self-consciously relinquishes its identification with a determinate or particular avatar in opposition to an also determinate and particular avatar. It identifies instead with the negation of identity itself. It comprehends the clash of finite avatars or identifications as a unity, which is to say that it recognizes a general structure therein and thereby makes what was apparently necessary (the choice between finite oppositions and its attendant embrace of a principle/god absurdly within and yet above the the world-encompassing I ) merely optional. Negation is only possible once these chaotic particulars are grasped as a unity. To negate one particular in isolation is merely to affirm its opposite.

The work is achieved both conceptually and emotionally. The "I" to be clarified is necessarily developed within a particular community. It must identify with the local "gods" or principles of its parents and its community to successfully become an adult. This is how it is tamed so that higher notions of autonomy become realistic. But achieving a higher notion of autonomy is one and the same with the negation or destruction of these investments that constitute its "spiritual" self. The idea is that we die into freedom, or that the slave within us dies screaming within a consuming fire also known as God. In this context, God is the implicit idea of freedom, a restless negativity that destabilizes and corrodes fixed or finite notions of the authoritative and the good. The negativity is desire for that obscure object, self-realization in terms of direct access to the authoritative and the good, which can be described as the desire to become the "God-man" or Christ (the end therefore of the law). This desire is "sin" to the self in its more alienated stages, so that the object is experienced in terms of a proximity to a God that remains other. But God is death to everything finite. The laughter of God annihilates "finite" solemnities, the endless chatter about sin and righteousness, dreams of providence and a final judgment. The god of the nation or of the particular faith is a false or finite god, or politics by another name --the immersion of the ego in a group ego. The living God is a bonfire of vanities, including the vanity of the word "God" and the contingent tradition that teaches us to use a particular word and system of images. The medium is burnt up in the consummation. The ladder is thrown away as a merely idiosyncratic or non-essential path to that which is the sustained negation of particular content. The realized "I" stands beyond all tradition and opposition of the finite to the finite. In less grandiose terms we have a living individual and his thousand idiosyncracies, eating shitting working a job, finding his cause in the maintenance of his ideal freedom from finite or positive or particular causes. His ideal identity is infinite. Like anyone, he works within the finite, engages in finite projects, votes perhaps for the lesser evil. But he does not sacrifice his ideal identity to anything particular. It stands (the I stands) without foundation, dialectically or progressively self-generated, self-realized, self-justified.

Fichte:
What is his vocation?—what belongs to him as Man, that does not belong to those known existences which are not men?—in what respects does he differ from all we do not call man amongst the beings with which we are acquainted?
I must lay down... a principle which exists indestructibly in the feelings of all men, which is the result of all philosophy... the principle, that as surely as man is a rational being, he is the end of his own existence; i.e. he does not exist to the end that something else may be, but he exists absolutely because he himself is to be—his being is its own ultimate object;—or, what is the same thing, man cannot, without contradiction to himself, demand an object of his existence. He is, because he is. This character of absolute being—of existence for his own sake alone,—is his characteristic or vocation...

I've been neglecting my work for philosophy, so this is my final transmission for awhile. It's a been a pleasure to discuss the higher things with all of you. Perhaps we'll speak again.